Zitat von Star Citizen

10 for the Chairman Episode 78

Chris Roberts, the Chairman of Cloud Imperium Games, answers 10 questions from our development subscribers.

02:09 – Patch Size
05:30 – NPC Generation
09:23 – Star Citizen Flight Module
10:44 – Docking and Undocking Tech
12:44 – Realistic Audio Options
14:18 – Personally Owned NPCs
15:46 – The Point of Farming
17:16 – Procedural Tech
19:45 – Vulkan
20:43 – My Hobbies

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Quelle: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/tran…or-The-Chairman

Zitat von Star Citizen

Monthly Studio Report February

Greetings Citizens,

We had an extra day this February, and we put it to good use! Star Citizen Alpha 2.2 is now ‘live’ and Citizens everywhere are making good use of the new features to expand their adventures around Crusader. Between the hostility system, physicalized EVA and the increased instance limit, things are hopping! An extra special thank you to our front line PTU testers this month, who helped us put out an astounding nine builds before we released 2.2! With 2.2 live, the team is eager to move on to features to be added for 2.3… but before that happens, we’ll take our monthly look back at Star Citizen’s progress for February 2016.

CIG Los Angeles

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Greetings Citizens!

We are back again with another month in 2016 that has come and gone. Time does seem to fly when you are having fun, doesn’t it? We are definitely having fun, but make no mistake, we are completely focused on getting more enjoyable content released so you can join our merriment within the black void of space.

With the 2.2 patch released, it is hard to believe it has already been a month since our last community update; not because time flies so quickly but because of how busy the CIG LA office has been these past 29 days (we definitely appreciate the Leap Year giving us an extra day to polish content). Just to give you an idea of what we have been up to, here is a breakdown of what each development team in the LA office has been up to.

Engineering

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The LA Engineering team has been elbows-deep in new technologies that are getting incorporated into Star Citizen. Starting with Allen Chen’s efforts, we have looked at how player interactions work in-game. For example, when planning out how a player will interact with an object, we realized that a single “Use” prompt was limiting us to a single predefined interaction with an object that didn’t take context into account. By allowing each object to handle interaction logic by itself, this reduces the amount of extra effort required to maintain all of the implementations. Allen has engineered the system so that each contextually possible interaction for an object will contain a localized string token that will be used by the UI to display the description of that action. This leads to a system that allows us to add, remove, enable, or disable interactions on an as-needed basis instead of a more cumbersome and error-prone ad hoc basis.

You may have heard us mention updates to the Shield system in our news updates, “10 for the Developers” series of videos, and other news outlets. While the Tech Design side is being handled by Lead Tech Designer Kirk Tome, the Engineering side is being performed by Associate Engineer Chad Zamzow with oversight by Lead Engineer Paul Reindell. Chad has been working on implementing the “Shield Generator” item to the revised design spec. A large part of this consists of matching the new components to the new design which involves pulling power and converting that power into shield points to be pushed into the corresponding shield pipe.

In an effort to increase efficiency in our coding and to help provide the Tech Designers with more powerful tools, we have created our own in-house tool we call DataForge. This tool allows us to create data quickly within the game without the need for parsing. This database not only allows us to view data in multiple ways, it also loads data faster and ensures that the data are adhering to a specific schema.

Both Mark Abent and John Pritchett have been hard at work behind the scenes, performing various changes to our game data that have potentially long-standing implications to how our data functions. Mark has been providing support for projectile creation through DataForge while John has been working on tweaks to the Thrusters and EVA. Mark’s changes to the Projectiles provides our Tech Designers with a powerful option to create projectiles directly through DataForge without having to go through XML editing. Flight Engineer John Pritchett has been busy cleaning up Thruster effects to fix the thruster effect range, boost effect range, and adding transitional effects when activating Boost.

Tech Design

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With the 2.2 release imminent, fixing bugs for 2.2 was the utmost priority for the Tech Design team this past month. Although Shield system has been at the forefront of the Tech Design team’s tasks with regards to new content, our ships have been making great progress through the pipeline as well.

Tech Design Lead Kirk Tome has completed the grey box stage of the Xi’An Scout. If you have not watched the recent “10 for the Developers” featuring Mr. Tome, you will find an abundance of information and updates regarding the Xi’An Scout. While the grey box stage has been completed, the final tech design for the Scout is still underway. Furthermore, Kirk has spent a considerable time performing a re-factor of in-game masses. Starting with the ships, he has been researching a more accurate and proper way of calculating the mass.

Apart from creating a metric for Shield performance, Tech Designer Calix is in the midst of completing the white box tech design stage of the Drake Caterpillar. This stage includes determining where the components will be located throughout the ship, the layout, along with other important features such as the list of what weapons it will have, where they’re located and most importantly, the basics of how the Cargo mechanic will function. Finally, with our components constantly evolving, Calix is designing how Power and Cooling will function within our ships.

As mentioned in the Engineering section, with the creation of our in-house tool, DataForge, it allows the Tech Design team greater efficiency and flexibility when creating new items and experimenting with parameterization (laying the groundwork for future balancing passes). Tech Designer Matt Sherman is in the middle of converting all of our Projectiles from XML and setting them up in DataForge. Since this is an ongoing and evolving task, Matt is also responsible for grey box tech designing the MISC Reliant. This includes the metrics that comprise the Reliant such as its internal layout, placement of hardpoints and various components, etc.

Art

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When it comes to the CIG LA Art team, there is definitely no shortage of exciting things to report. New ships and old ship revamps along with character updates have been a top priority for the Art team. Furthermore, the Art team has also been responsible for creating lots of new artwork across the game.

While Calix has been working on the white box tech design of the Caterpillar, he has been working hand in hand with 3D Art Lead Elwin Bachiller, who in turn has been working on the modeling white box based on additional concept artwork using updates to the Drake style guide, both created by Concept Artist Gurmukh Bhasin.

Moreover, the LA Art team has also been working on the MISC Reliant, having completed several milestones. Exterior LODs were completed by Daniel Kamentsky, while Elwin completed redesigning the cockpit. The changes to the Reliant’s cockpit include redesigning the UI in order to adhere to updated UI specifications, animation, and textures. These are all part of a “flight prep” pass completed by Elwin. The flight prep pass is a review of everything that is needed before the ship becomes “flight ready.” This includes doing a pass over the damage states, LODs, and other precursor tidbits before it is released.

On the Character side, Artist Omar Aweidah has finished creating high-poly geometry for undersuit armor and several UEE Navy item variants have been his responsibility.

Speaking of costumes, Jeremiah Lee is submitting a first pass for the Heavy Armor concept after completing an early design pass on the same. Like our spaceships, designing armor and clothing also go through a series of approvals and revisions before they are approved for creation. This ensures we are adhering to thematic style guides based on key manufacturer embellishments.

Tech Content

The Technical content team is the amalgamation of Tech Art and Tech Animation into a global unified team.

This team consists of Technical Animators and Technical Artists working together to bring together all of the Art, Animation and even Engineering proceeds into a cohesive “in game” asset or feature. Typically this includes complex problem solving across many different pieces of software, educating members of other teams on best practices for coordination and handoffs, constant performance profiling and even reactive bug fixes on release build content, just to name a few. This team also includes key developers that perform the rigging and animation implementations of both ships and characters.

On the ship side, recently-promoted Senior Technical Artist Mark McCall (congratulations on a well-deserved accolade) has been tackling animation bugs for the 2.2.0 release. These include fixes such issues as the Vanduul Scythe/Glaive firing animations, adding steps to prevent clipping animations of the Landing Gear through Mannequin, optimizing thruster setups and many other important fixes.

Meanwhile, Patrick Salerno is continuing the review of all ship LODs and normalizing the mesh count and more importantly density. Patrick is making a huge effort to ensure that performance is at the highest possible level across all of these ships and is currently reviewing the Mustang and Hornet along with each respective variant.

Senior Tech Artist Matt Intrieri is currently performing an LOD pass on various ship components which include the landing gear, escape pods, thrusters, intakes, and many other components. This is an ongoing task given the number of assets requiring his review. Associate Rigger Gaige Hallman and Senior Rigger John Riggs have completed rigging of various character assets that will become obvious to players once character customization comes online. Gaige has finalized the process of skinning vertices from the character models whilst John has completed the asset rigging and simulation setup for the UEE Navy BDU uniform. Next up for John is performing R&D for rigging the Vanduul – we can’t wait to see the results of this!

Narrative

For the most part, we’ve been focusing pretty heavily on Squadron 42. Lead Dave Haddock has bounced over to the UK for the month while Will’s been Skyping in to have daily meetings with the Squadron 42 designers to step through the game to see how the levels and gameplay have been progressing, to see if any changes have necessitated any additional pick-up lines from our higher tier actors, and delve a little deeper into the dialogue and narrative needs for the secondary (non-principal) cast members.

On the PU front, we’ve been working with Designers in Austin and the UK to flesh out more of the landing zones, provide lore support for ship components and help out with developing narrative in the Baby PU.

In the Starmap and Galactapedia arenas, Adam finished his review of the previously published Galactic Guides, resulting in a monstrous 120-page document outlining potential changes/disparities that would need to be made to bring either the Galactic Guide or the Starmap in sync. We will all sit down and go through each one to talk them out. Meanwhile, Cherie has continued to work with our awesome astronomy consultants to generate the scientific data while waging her epic battle with the internal wiki.

So that’s it for us. Nothing terribly new to report (that we can disclose at least), but continuing to chip away at the mountain of needs.

Quality Assurance

CIG LA’s Quality Assurance team expanded as we welcomed two new testers to the team after extensively reviewing applicants; Eric Pietro and Colby Schneider have joined Vincent Sinatra as members of the CIG LA Quality Assurance department – and their timing could not have been better. Considerable time was spent training the duo and getting them up to speed with regards to CIG’s QA methodologies, software testing theory, and acclimating them to our fun world. In a few short days they were ready to hit the ground running; the LA QA team aided our ATX and UK counterparts in testing the new 2.2 code for PTU pushes, as well as investigated a number of issues for Design and Development, including but not limited to:

• The new Hostility Feature
• Sabre Flight Performance & Equipment loadouts
• New cooler component implementation
• EVA adjustments and zone grid transitions
• Ship entry animations
• The transition from 16 to 24 playable ships in Crusader
• Shield recharge times

The QA team also performed an audit of the mass for all ships, as well as a landing gear pass to ensure everything lined up to specs and was functioning correctly.

Conclusion

As always, this is just the tip of the iceberg of what is going on behind the scenes here in Los Angeles. We are not only excited about you enjoying 2.2, we are also planning for the future and working on quite a large pool of features that are slated for later patches. We are only two months into 2016 and we are always looking at what is next, ready to face these challenges, knowing that the trust you have for us is greatly appreciated. We are proud to have you along for this epic adventure, in the game and out, and we hope you look forward to seeing the major developments to be released in Star Citizen in the coming months of 2016.

CIG Austin

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Greetings Citizens,

February began with a push to get 2.1.2 to the Live server, and ended with a push to get 2.2.0 to the Live server. It’s been a busy month and we’ve made an incredible amount of progress on many fronts! The Persistent Universe team has been hard at work, and will have results to show in game very soon. QA and Live Ops have been working around the clock as always, and the global nature of our company and our community allows us to make continuous forward progress on our goals any time of the day or night. Enjoy some detailed reports from each team leader!

Persistent Universe

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The PU Team in Austin has been making significant progress on several different features this month, the main one being PERISTENCE! Yes that’s right, the cornerstone feature of a “persistent” universe is indeed the ability to persist data across play sessions, and Jason Ely and the server team here in Austin have been making great strides into laying the groundwork on the backend. We are rounding the corner on this massive undertaking, having rewritten whole portions of the codebase to get this integrated into the game. The first feature we’ve been testing with is “Shopping”, and our first release with Persistence in it will utilize Casaba Outlet’s stock of shirts, pants, jackets, etc. to show off persistent gameplay. We’ve also been brainstorming other ideas for opportunities to utilize Persistence in gameplay, such as player health, ship/item health, currency, and reputation.

Having mentioned Shopping, let me elaborate on this feature a bit more. This month we’ve solidified the flow of Shopping Phase 1, and we’re wrapping up the tasks that are required to set up Casaba Outlet as a shop in game. This means setting up the clothing racks with items, tagging each item with the tags necessary to get it to show up in the UI correctly, and calling out variants for the clothing assets that have been made so the Character Team can schedule these in. We hope to populate the shop with enough to keep you guys engaged on the first release, but leave enough empty space to allow us to fill it with more varied clothing assets later on down the line.

Ship Artists Chris Smith and Josh Coons spent their time this month wrapping up Final Art phase for the Xi’an Scout. They’ll be moving on to the Herald next month, we’re excited to see what they do with it. Emre Switzer finished lighting passes on the shops for the Levski landing zone in Nyx, as well as for the Asteroid and Business Hangar. Mark Skelton has completed several style guides for clothing manufacturers within the ‘verse that will inform character concept artists and 3d modelers going forward.

Our Animators spent much of this month developing animations for use in Astro Armada and G-Loc Bar. We also did some work on various enter/exit speeds for the Avenger and Aurora, and we hope to carry this over for all ships into next month. Lead Ship Animator Jay Brushwood spent a couple weeks in the UK syncing up with the Ship Team there, establishing steps in the pipeline and ironing out kinks in the workflow and communication. It was a very productive trip, it’s always good for folks to get face-time with other studios when possible.

Lastly, work wrapped up on the Friends System 2.0, which transitions the Friends/Contacts system from Platform to our backend services. This new Friends System incorporates some much needed new features, such as the Ignore List. This has been handed off to our UI Team to schedule in and create the front-end work for this feature.

Live Operations

QA

When the month of February began QA was wrapping up our previous release of Star Citizen Alpha 2.1.2 to our Live environment. QA continued to investigate a couple of lingering issues as well as gathered public feedback. Shortly thereafter, QA began focusing efforts squarely on testing the new features which would be included in the next release.

Todd Raffray headed up an early test of the new Party System updates. Each feature improvement was documented and individually tested to ensure the updates worked effectively. QA was very happy to ensure that playing with your friends would be much improved in 2.2.0.

The team then began testing additional features that were slated to be included in 2.2.0. These included Monitored Space, The Hostility System, and the changes to the layout of the Crusader map. The team also created a list of must fix issues which was then delivered to production.

Each new system was meticulously tested by the coordinated efforts of each of our QA teams around the world. The day would begin with our QA teams in UK and Frankfurt beginning testing headed up by the leadership of QA Manager Phil Webster and Senior QA Tester Steven Brennon. As the day progressed, the testing would be handed off to our US QA teams headed up by QA Leads Andrew Hesse and Vincent Sinatra. The daily information hand-offs went very smoothly and contributed to almost 24 hour daily testing coverage. This coverage ensured development continued smoothly to help release 2.2.0 as soon as possible.

As new 2.2.0 features came online, they were added to our list of things to test for release. These included flight testing of the newly flyable Sabre, the hangar ready Xi’an Scout, ship cooler items and the new physically based zero gravity EVA.

Additional in-depth testing was conducted on the ship combat time to kill values for each available ship and weapon as well as a comprehensive pass on the ship landing and repair mechanics.

We have had some new recruits added to our ranks this month. Phil Webster has joined our Foundry 42 office in Manchester, UK. Phil comes to us from Sony. Phil will be fulfilling the role of QA Manager and is already doing great things leading the Foundry 42 team. Please welcome Lee Jones to our Foundry 42 testing team. Lee also comes to us from Sony and will be assisting our Veteran Liam Guest in dedicated Squadron 42 testing.

We also have 2 new testers joining our LA studio this month. Eric Pietro and Colby Anderson. Both Eric and Colby have industry experience and have already proven to be great additions to the LA QA team.

Senior QA Tester Christopher Speaks travelled from our Frankfurt studio to Foundry 42 and held training sessions for our UKQA team on the testing and use of the Cryengine Sandbox Editor.

Right now the team is working hard to get 2.2.0 out to the live environment as soon as possible. For the month of March, the team will be focusing on testing the new additions which will be included in Star Citizen Alpha 2.3.0. We are very much looking forward to the new content coming soon. See you in the Verse!

Game Support

February has been an amazing month for Will Leverett and Chris Danks as Game Support worked feverishly alongside QA, Production, and our PTU testers to get 2.2.0 branched, built, tested, fixed, and shipped out the door. To go from branching to full release in three weeks is amazing, and we think we can still improve the process to make it even better.

We spent quite a bit of time this month working on establishing our new protocols for PTU invite waves. This was accomplished by focusing on Issue Council engagement and previous PTU participation. From our perspective, 2.2.0 on PTU has been amazingly successful, and in no small part due to the passionate backers who were always ready to help. We’ve gotten amazing feedback that went right into the development pipeline, particularly through the Issue Council and structured playtests.

Many players have questioned why we did not roll out 2.2.0 to a greater number of players on PTU, or what the downside is to having more players involved. The answer is twofold: 1) cost and 2) 2.2.0 simply did not require additional waves for testing (in fact, sometimes having fewer is better). Each build download and every server costs money, and if we can avoid unnecessary expenditures while still accomplishing our development goals, that helps everyone in the long run. Additionally, bugs involving resource allocation and network bandwidth can result in errors that manifest quickly even with relatively small numbers of players. When bugs of this kind are involved, expanding PTU access often doesn’t help diagnose the problem, it just makes it worse – incurring higher cost for no benefit is just plain wasteful. In cases like this, bugfixes are investigated and applied while the addition of additional waves of testers proceeds at a much more controlled rate until it’s clear that the blocker has been addressed.

A very healthy 70% of the Wave One group participated in at least one build since 2.2.0 went to PTU, and we’ll cull the other 30% from the list in order to rotate in others who want in to help with active testing.
Aside from 2.2.0, Game Support was able to spend time on our service issues, getting completely caught up on our tickets (along with our colleagues in Customer Service) and we’re excited that we can provide quick turnarounds now to players who need individual support.

Related to that, Game Support will be working with Customer Service and Turbulent to assess different options for creating a true knowledge base that serves the players of Star Citizen. We certainly don’t want to roll out a drab, mechanical site, but instead provide a medium in which the community can interact, find solutions, and when possible, help each other.

It’s been a super productive month, and we’re excited to roll right into March on the road to 2.3.0!

IT/Operations

February has been about Data. We are working on an important project with the rest of the Operations teams and key Development team members in our Frankfurt studio to fix these huge patches once and for all. This project could take some time to roll out due to the depth of work involved but the project is too exciting not to mention.

Patch sizes have to do with the way the data is prepared for each version we publish. We know that patch differential between builds includes between 5-10% change for most builds. However, because the changed files are mixed with the unchanged files then compressed to larger pak files for delivery, even one small change in data can cause an entire pak file look different to the patcher due to the output of the compression scheme, which the patcher sees as an entirely new large file.

In order to correct this, we need to change a number of things including how the game engine reads data. We also need to change the build system and the entire delivery pipeline in order to do this right. Once done, we’re expecting to see major improvement in the size of patches between versions but we’re hoping for even more. Changes to the build system supporting this new approach should also allow us to do more incremental data builds rather than the much longer full builds. This would greatly reduce the time between developer fixes and testing, particularly for a game the size of Star Citizen.

LiveOps

This month the team has been working around the clock on deployments and the build system. We delivered 8 publishes to PTU with major improvements to the process allowing us to minimize downtime to moments from hours. Our analytics reporting has undergone major improvement in February both on the client and data side.

Our build system has been undergoing some substantial changes at the same time which leads to a tricky balancing act when trying to keep up with all the internal builds and PTU publishes. So far we’ve rolled out a new distributed compilation system which has shaved another 75-90% off the build times depending on build type, a new format for keeping track of data, internal and external automated crash reporting, as well as a completely new inclusion/exclusion system which helps us refine our builds down to specific testing goals.

We’ve also been working closely with the IT team and the rest of the Operations teams toward the goal of reducing our patch sizes. This task will likely trigger the largest set of changes introduced to the build system to date since we’re incorporating major changes to the build process as well as the delivery pipeline which will have positive impact on internal development as well as external patch delivery. In order to make all this happen while maintaining full support of the existing development schedule we will be building a completely separate build system which will run in parallel to the existing system. IT better crank up their air conditioners because we’re gonna smoke those servers!

Foundry 42 UK

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Hello Star Citizens!

Between Star Citizen 2.2 and continuing work on Foundry 42, all of the Foundry 42 UK teams have been working hard and delivering excellent results. Keep in mind that we can’t share everything for fear of spoiling the events of Squadron 42… but there’s still plenty we CAN talk about.

Design

We have had another busy month in the UK design department. We are still working on the “new player experience” which is hopefully going to make the learning curve less steep for new backers. This not only encompasses a simplified UI set, but also has a refactor of the controls system to be more conceptually consistent across the various game modes such as EVA, FPS, and space flight. We are still working on mobiGlas, this is a biggie as it is one of the major aspects of both S42 and the PU so we want to get it right the first time around. Scanning, for both cockpit and FPS, is now underway, and we are looking forward to getting sub-targeting of components into the game soon.

Andrew and the Tech team have had a number of meetings about the various balancing issues and we are hopeful that you will start to see the positive results in the coming releases (not in time for 2.2 unfortunately).

The Idris is getting closer to a game ready state and we have enjoyed our first forays into the test universe with a design team crewing it.

S42 is moving along nicely and we are starting to see blockers shifted in a timely manner so the design truck can keep rolling.

Audio

It’s been a jam-packed month as far as CIG Audio is concerned. Apart from the usual bug fixes, we had a very nasty in-game distortion issue at the start of February that was extremely hard to reproduce, and near-impossible to profile. Thanks to our fantastic QA department, as well as Sam Hall, Graham Phillipson, Mikhail Korotyaev and our friends at Audiokinetic for assisting with fixing that, and the community at large who were hugely helpful in sending us data and user stories. Apologies to anyone who suffered from this but we reacted to it as fast as we could. Good came of it, in that we now have added some analytics for the audio system, so we can keep an eye on audio resource usage in the wild (again, thanks to Sam for pushing that out there).

Work continues apace on ‘Squadron 42’, and Ross Tregenza has continued with putting down as many audio foundations as possible, and keeping close eye on cross-discipline progress. All of the systematic elements we’re working on across the whole game feed into Squadron 42, but there’s still a lot of custom and bespoke aspects of it to keep track of and make sure we’re ready for, so that when the time is right the whole team will sweep across this module.

Ross also worked with Sam Hall on the monitored zone system audio which you’ll witness soon enough, it’s still in a relatively early stage where the audio is concerned and we’ll improve this further as we iterate upon it.

Bob Rissolo has been very heavily invested in the Dialogue Pipeline tools and database. This is quite a large project in itself, that feeds into the main Star Citizen experience but is again very important for Squadron 42 which is going to be very character dialogue-centric. He’s been mainly working with Simon Price, who’s joined us as a Consultant Audio Programmer.

Bob Rissolo and Phil Smallwood built up and tested out the dialogue recording rig extensively in a test shoot in mid-February, to make sure we’re up to the task of recording dialogue for performance capture sessions. For the most part it all worked as expected with only minor settings tweaks and optimisations required.

Sam Hall has submitted Version 2.0 of the Music System, including a visual logic editor. This shipped in 2.2.0 and was a ‘surprisingly smooth’ transition, at least so he says! Until we get some new content it might not be hugely obvious it’s there, which is a good thing in some respects. You want an in-game soundtrack and musical cues to sound as natural as it does in the movies, if not moreso. If it were to catch your attention unnecessarily, it could be more distracting than immersive.

Talking of new music content though: myself, Ross Tregenza and Pedro Macedo Camacho combined our powers and braved the (actually rather mild) Slovakian winter to attend our first orchestral performance this year, at the Slovak Radio building with the Slovakian National Symphony Orchestra. This provided us with new content for ship-based space combat, which will feed into the aforementioned music-logic system when the material is ready; we still need to add some extra momentary layers and elements for it to be as reactive to the game as Chris Roberts desires. Chris is very into his dynamic music, having pioneered such a system back on ‘Wing Commander’. So, we still have the extra material to come before we take it to a mixing session to give it some polish, after we’ve proven its effectiveness in our new system. Will keep you posted, and try to get some material from this out for you to experience when the time is right. Many thanks to our conductor Allan Wilson, recording engineer Peter Fuchs and our orchestral fixer Paul Talkington for arranging things.

These days we’re thinking heavily about dynamic/procedural mix methods, rather than the usual state-based mixing that’s common to more linear titles. To this end Darren Lambourne has been putting together a dynamic bass management prototype, which is a great place to start when it comes to figuring out mix fundamentals within Wwise. Many games suffer from the summation of too much low-end and we want to keep the experience clean, and configurable, for our users to reflect their different demands and differing set-ups. Will let you know when we have this ready to push out to the game proper but so far it’s quite promising.

And talking of mix – Darren is also working on a parametric mix/effects system to reflect atmospheric depressurisation, whether that’s out in space or when inside depressurised interior locations. We have the concept right now whereby exterior sound is simulated within ships – controversial we know but we feel it makes sense! However, the player suit when exposed to space independent of one’s ship, in our lore at least, it doesn’t have the processing power to perform the same function, at least not to the same level of fidelity. So what you’ll probably hear will be much more akin to structure-borne sound transmission, coupled with a lot of suit/internalised elements. We’re just starting with this one and we want it to be consistent with logic and gameplay, but also dramatically satisfying in its own right. Will share more once we have this at a good place.

Darren’s also pushed out some great EVA audio improvements, particularly re. the manoeuvring jetpack thrusters. We hope you appreciate this one, the articulation is way ahead of where it was previously. In some ways this is now much more subtle, but also far more responsive to player input. We’ll get together some video to show this off properly but it’s far more characterful while still retaining subtlety. We hope you like it.

Stefan Rutherford’s been working on some space-station mixing – there’s some neat bass modulation on one of the stations that varies things as you traverse. He’s done some lovely stuff on the Reliant, too; he’s produced ship ambient mark-up, with parameterisation of sounds so that all of them become far more responsive to external factors. E.g. power-plant level, ship strain. Under his model a single light buzz on a panel can change in tone and timbre, if power output is high to other components – because non-critical ones (such as a light) are receiving less power. A light fitting will also tend to rattle when the ship is undergoing excessive gravitational forces or ‘excitement’. We hope the summation of this level of detail will contribute to the ship experience.

Thanks to hard work by Graham Phillipson and Matteo Cerquone, we now have a solid and working piece of tech for ‘Automatic Character Foley’ in place. Traditionally, this sort of character-based sound would be spotted by hand to animation files, but we wanted to make this far more system-driven, as it’s a very labour intensive approach that doesn’t stand up to variable wearables (that’s a tough thing to say) or animation and clothing simply changing dynamically. So now, we have a system that modulates clothing and equipment sounds in response to limb velocities. We’ll hopefully be able to factor in clothing changes soon too, plus added equipment layers that’ll change depending on what weapon you may have equipped. Matteo’s also been working with the Xi’an Scout which has some great SFX in place.

Following on from the auto Foley though, we now also have a solid prototype for Automated Footsteps. Again, this is traditionally very labour intensive stuff, whereby sound designers would open up an animation file and spot to a timeline. That’s not a robust enough solution for us, so Graham has somehow figured out a way to infer accurate footstep movement and articulation, and play back appropriate sounds – in real time. We know this might not seem like a massive deal but there are many sound designers who’ve contributed man-months to this very task in the past so to solve this problem… well, one of us cried a tear of joy. Almost.

As fuel for the Foley fires (again with the tongue-twisters), we have a ‘wild Foley’ session upcoming to record footsteps, and some physics object style sounds (impacts, slides, rolls etc.). Stefan and Matteo will be overseeing that session, hopefully we’ll gather some eminently usable material there.

We also have a firearms session due at the end of March to capture outdoor gun-fire impulses/tails in an urban environment, for in-atmosphere locations with lots of reflective surfaces, in contrast to our earlier interior sessions which were more ‘roomy’, this is all about distant reflections that help define the outdoors.

Jason Cobb has been working on bug fixes, design documentation, scripting improvements to workflow. He also has sound design coming together for ship debris clouds, subject to a system to drive this properly, but looking forward to that.

Luke Hatton has continued on ship sounds, as is his specialism – we’re always fixing and refining audio for those as you know!

Oh, watch out for an upcoming extended version of the Big Benny Noodles theme. But I’ve already said too much about this, I’m sure…

Thanks for listening everyone, sorry it was such a long update but it’s been a big old month. We blame the leap year thing. Thanks!

Engineering

This month’s new big feature for the live releases is the hostility system. We wanted to start coming up with ways where you could see that your actions would have some sort of consequence, and as a result get some additional emergent gameplay going on. As a first step we’ve introduced safe zones, such as around Port Olisar, where the space will be monitored for any illegal behaviour. If you start shooting up an innocent party in the zone you will automatically get a wanted level, become a hostile, you will be marked up on everybody else’s radar as hostile and as you fire on more and more innocent parties the higher your wanted level goes up. Whilst you’re in the safe zone AI will spawn in and try and take you down. To make it more interesting if you have a wanted level you also become fair game for all the other players, so now anybody can now attack you without fear of reprisal. Of course if you are attacking other players outside of a monitored zone it won’t get noticed and your global reputation stands intact, although the players you attacked will remember and see you as hostile going forwards. You can reduce your wanted level though by using a terminal to hack into the system…

Outside of the releases, we’ve been making progress on lots of the other systems. The code to support turrets has been having a bit of an overhaul as previously it was tied very closely to the vehicles, whereas we want to have standalone turrets on a space station for example. We kicked off work on the scanning feature, where you will be able to use your radar to scan vehicles in more detail and get information as to what weapons they’ve got or even what cargo they’re carrying. This of course depends on how good your scanning hardware is and how good the blocking hardware of what you’re trying to scan has. This scanning is also going to be incorporated in the same way when in FPS mode so you can get information about the players around you.

Talking about FPS again it’s about making steady progress on all its mechanics. The new physicalized EVA is getting more and more solid, we’ve been spending a lot of time trying to fix up a lot of edge case issues, mostly when transitioning from inside a vehicle to outside, so you’re going from gravity to zero-g, or vice-versa (or from non-EVA to EVA). Cover is getting better and work has now started on prone and vaulting.

Graphics

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WIP - New Optics #1

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WIP - Old Optics #1

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WIP - New Optics #2

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WIP - Old Optics #2

This month the team has completed some final R&D work into the Gas Cloud tech, and out of that has created a roadmap for the gas cloud system. This outlines when we can start giving this tech to our other internal teams, such as art and design, to work with.

After discovering resolving several bugs with our recent Vis Area/Zone tweaks, the team moved to working on the facial tech. This work has been testing the current framework, to find performance bottle necks, bugs and the look to make general improvements to the tech to get the best out of it without reducing performance.

We have also been working on updates to bloom and lens flares. The current bloom implementation has a harsh falloff around glowing objects and requires their brightness to be cranked up significantly to be visible. The new system will allow for more subtle glows with a softer falloff, and its performance will also scale better with higher resolutions.

With the current flare system, an artist has to create a flare set for each light that generates flares, and simulating different lenses (e.g. for cinematics vs gameplay) which requires a lot of manual work creating multiple sets. There is also a limit on the number of flares that can be rendered per frame before they start breaking. We’re working on a system to procedurally render flares in screen space with a more physically based method, and the new system should significantly reduce the workload for artists and make it easier to change the look of the scene on the fly.

VFX

This month the VFX team have been working on getting the latest flight-ready ships including the Vanguard and Sabre. We’ve also done some thorough R&D for the Xi’An Scout effects, as we want to tie in with the fiction and create a unique style of effects compared to the human and Vanduul technologies. This all based on the VFX style guide which we mentioned in last month’s report; building a consistent visual language through a ship’s effects is very important for player readability, especially against the vast backdrop of space!

Away from ships, things are progressing solidly on Squadron 42’s environmental effects, as the environment and design teams have been fleshing out their levels in greater detail which allows us to jump in and add effects where required. There’s so much here we would love to tell you about but we can’t for obvious reasons – no spoilers!

Art

The team has been full steam ahead, internal concept and external all busting out fab looking work and it’s been a varied lot too!

Here’s a list which I’m sure you can discern what belongs to what: the Idris Gravity Generator room, Idris Cargo Room, Idris story line look dev, Planet look dev, Vanduul weapon look dev, Bengal Hangar, Hangar Breakouts, Bengal Bridge console/chair refinement, Powerplants, Quantum Drives, Coolers, Military props, Shubin Pilot briefing room, Shubin Bridge, [REDACTED] ship cargo room, Research Station look dev for the Gravity room and communal areas, Scourge Rail gun final pass, Rail Attachment system, ammo and just started on a new small ship! Oh – and some 2nd pass concept on storyline bases – that’s it for Feb!

Props

There is a running theme here, another month and a few more ship components! We now have the first couple of coolers and shield generators complete and the power plants have been started.
But more exciting than that is that our team has grown! We have gone from 2 in the UK at the start of January up to 4, with our 5th member joining next week!

Apart from the ship components the team has been focusing on low tech props, we are focusing mainly on assets that can be used in both the PU environments as well as the squadron 42 environments. We have completed a few more tests with the blend layer material mentioned last month and have asked for a few little tweaks from the rendering team before we can go full steam ahead with it.

Finally we’ve have been making an effort to get on top of our documentation backlog. Now the teams growing it’s really important to have our pipeline properly documented and as its evolved over the last couple of months there is a bit to update! I’ve also been creating and updating our template files to make the animators lives a little easier and improve consistency across the board.

Characters

Our two man team has been busy as a pair of motivated bees, I’m not going to spoil any surprises but the character work now is really starting to matchup with the rest of the game in terms of fidelity and quality – exciting times, plus we have hired 2 more people to join the UK team – things are looking up!

Environment Art

This month the environment team have been hard at work fleshing out the environments for Squadron 42, there is a huge range of environments in production currently, so there is a frenzy of activity within the team. There is lots of back and forth between the level artists and designers as they move forwards refining the designs and layouts, something which is quick and entirely real-time using our modular system. That’s it for this months, back to it!

Ships

The Ship Team has been in the process of planning their angle of attack for the rest of the year, laying foundations down to hopefully make the rest of the year’s production run smoothly to push towards fully content complete of the SQ42 within the next few months ( content complete meaning all assets are in-game, playable but requiring polish ). Major highlights of this process have been pulling the RSI Bengal into a metric system that will take full advantage of a modular construction approach, much like we have done on the Idris, meaning we can have twice as much visual awesomeness with less of a knock on to both visual and memory costs in the engine. The Bengal was the first ship to be seen ever for Star Citizen in the original reveal, it’s like the Crown Jewel of SC and will be treated as such!

Both the Aegis Idris and Javelin have continued into final production, the Javelin taking full advantage of the Idris’ interior modules, meaning essentially whatever wins we make on the Idris roll over to the Javelin by default, this also has the added benefit that the Javelins interior production will in fact finish not far behind the Idris even though production on the Idris started several months before, we are gaining variation between the two ships with a clever use of material swaps, lighting and atmospherics, the Javelins will have a far more grittier feel to suit its role / characteristic as a ship.

On top of the above, production is almost complete on the Starfarer Base variant, she is looking beautiful indeed, but more so in our opinion is the Gemini variant, the Gemini being kitted out by Aegis really brings an interesting dynamic to the ship’s aesthetic.

Foundry 42 Frankfurt

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Greetings Citizens,

The weather in Frankfurt this month was definitely colder than last, but it hasn’t slowed us down. This month the team added new people in Weapons Art, Animation, AI, and Game Programming, we’re now up to 37. As the team grows out here we can feel it continuing to pick up momentum, which is always a good thing.

Early in the month we had a handful of internal visitors to the office including Chris and Erin. It gave us a good amount of time to look through schedules, adjust priorities, discuss design systems and tech approaches, etc. We also had a few backers through the office which was fun, the team appreciated the good words and the fattening treats.

Thanks again for all the German team support from the backers and fans, it means a lot to us.

AI

Early in the month we completed the first pass on the refactoring of the Human perception. The new perception is now fully distributed and optimized: we mostly split the perception into visual perception and audio perception. All the other stimuli are either perceived currently as audio or visual objects. In the future we are planning to have several types of senses that can be plugged into the perception if needed.

The vision perception is mostly based on the CryEngine VisionMap, it allowed us to have a very flexible system that on the CPU side uses an average of 0.01ms! The audio map allows us to model the perception of sound stimuli and it also uses an average of 0.01ms! The new perception abstracts what’s perceived by the different sense and what we use as the target: the behavior tree is in control of the selection of the target and we are also supporting future extensions for characters that might be able to track multiple targets at the same time.

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H3. Notes on the Image

• The yellow lines represent the audio events that each NPC has received in relation of different sources.
• The blue lines point to the last position when the target has transitioned between being visible and not visible.
• The green lines point to visible objects in the world for each NPC
• The pink lines represent the attention target of the NPC. If the target is visible it points to the entity otherwise to the last known position of the target.

We also made very good progresses on Subsumption. We now have a proper tool developed directly by Tony Zurovec, from Austin, that allows the designers to create Subsumption routines. On our side we process the data created by this tool to actually transform data into behaviors that run in the game. We currently have a first version of NPCs running Subsumption, and the code is very optimised in memory. 50 characters running different Subactivities uses around 12Kb of memory. Subsumption is controlled by our high level behavior tree so that any character can also be able to react quickly to combat scenarios using our systemic combat behaviors.

We then improved several aspects of the Cover usage, we introduce the functionality to blacklist specific cover spots for a specific amount of time, and avoid the effect of NPCs nonsensically selecting covers that have been compromised a few seconds before. We also fixed the selection of the cover based on the actual occupancy size of the character itself so that different NPCs won’t select covers too close to each other.

We completed the ground work to run dynamic behavior trees inside a main high level one, so that scripted requests can be directly accepted and run by the designers only when the behavior tree is ready without conflicting with the main behavior tree. Also we introduced the concept of “Primary” and “Secondary” actions in the AISequences so that we can properly validate the logic setup from the level designers and guarantee that what they want to achieve is correctly communicated to the AI.

Another feature we worked on is the ground work for Assignments, this is the way a designer can suggest specific high level goal to an NPC, something like “Defend a specific area”, “Attack a specific target”, and so on. Along with the above, this should lead to NPCs that can react properly to distractions without completely losing sight of the orders they’ve been given.

In addition to all of that we have continued to improve the stability of the builds in general.

Builds Ops

We recently switched to use BinXml assets for release builds, this is now the default. Continued work on Trybuild development, deploying and stabilization. We have got a solid db backend now (mysql/postgres), instead of a mere sqlite database, running in a docker container. This allows us to persist data through server and/or service reboots.

We’re doing preparation work to soon switch Transformer to Buildbot Nine. Lots of changes/improvements/fixes have been made across the entire pipeline.

Cinematics

A crucial cinematic scene right before Admiral Bishop’s speech in the UEE senate got a major upgrade from our side. The work on that is still ongoing.

It seemed crucial to Chris and Hannes that we wanted a bigger canvas for the tragedy of these planetside scenes to play out on. Frank, our Senior Env Artist for Cinematics was quite busy building rubble pieces and other things we don’t want to spoil right now.

For much of the month, Hannes was busy building up these scenes and doing further previs on some Bengal Carrier scenes as UK art is currently jumping on that one. Mike Nagasaka was busy with Chapter 02 and both of us were looking into different holoshader improvement options and did some visual prototyping for a pivotal moment involving alien holo tech during Chapter “X”.

Animation is busy with prepping pcap we have for Chapter “X” which involves the Starfarer and as that ship has progressed nicely to almost final art we can easily tackle those scenes next month.

Bishop’s head model got some refinement, and we tested that as quite some tech issues were fixed since we had him take the stage in the first scene featuring him at the UEE Senate.

As on ongoing side project we are revamping the cinematic timeline module “Trackview” so that it supports the needs for ships and AI characters, as well as major usability fixes. This will go on for quite some time longer and Sascha Hoba or as we call him “the fixer” is doing a tremendous job on that which will help cinematic sequences shine!

VFX

Over the past few weeks the DE VFX team has been working on getting the Xi’an scout ship ready for release. This includes a full VFX pass, including things such as thruster effects, damage effects, weapon effects and even a new version of the quantum drive based on the Xi’an tech style. You can see the current status in our header image.

Tech Art

The Tech Art team continued developing the internal animation pipeline, supporting cinematics for various tech setups. The team also worked on the FPS weapons rigs and supported the in-game animation team for finalizing the DCC and engine camera for players and weapons.

Engine Programming

Our Senior Engine Programmer is Christopher Bolte, and his focus during the last month was on two aspects of the game: data transfer protocols (critical to loading times) and the ObjectContainer System. Most of the time was spent on the new data transfer protocol mentioned last month and we made good progress there.

So far we already have the capability of storing all the assets of the game in a single, very large, pak file and to update this pak file incrementally. The Engine also has the initial support to be able to start from such a pak file. The next steps for the new data patching process is to hook those tools up into our internal build distribution process so that we can test how well the proposed system will perform. Hopefully we can provide updates on how well this worked next month.

The second focus was on providing our UK Engineers with support for the ObjectContainer System. This system is sort of a replacement of our current level format, with the twist that we can load ObjectsContainer when we already have an objects container loaded. Practically this means we can prepare loading a universe scale level with a very large amount of space stations, planets, or large object groups, even where only the parts that are supposed to be visible to the player are resident in memory. This system should allow us long term to scale to extremely large levels containing many interesting and different objects. So far we have initial support working so that we could load levels with ObjectsContainer instead of as levels. This is absolutely critical to providing a seamless gameplay experience with transparent loading times, made all the more crucial by the fact that the client (your) computer actually only has so much memory to work with.

As the next steps we will extent this basic version to space stations and ships so that we can load complex objects more efficiently.

Code

This month, we made a whole bunch of code related improvements. Including:

• WAF build system rollout. All devs are able to compile the project much faster now.
• Public crash handler rollout with 2.2. Already getting good intel from our community in PTU. Thanks to everybody participating and agreeing to send crash info our way.
• More improvements for code quality tracking (system to track asserts automatically, trybuild on the way to avoid submitting code that doesn’t build against latest code depot).

Additionally:

We’ve made further progress on the much improved patching solution. The plan is to really ever only download files (inside .paks) that changed. In the future we might expose control of data compression on user’s end to allow custom balancing of IO bandwidth vs CPU decompression time. Incorporating a much more modern compression scheme is also planned (much less CPU decompression overhead for similar compression rates). All this will require stabilizing asset file formats so that re-exports of unchanged assets do not invalidate much of the previously shipped content.

Progress started on further improving optimized mesh data storage format. Vertex streams of meshes will get much more aggressive compression of per-vertex normals and tangent frames all the way up to the GPU (decompressed in vertex shader with very little overhead). This will reduce the .pak size, improve load times and streaming, as well as reduce GPU bandwidth which is critically important for the highly (vertex) detailed meshes of our ships, etc.

We’ve also done a good amount of work on the procedural tech, but don’t want to go into the details just yet, we’ll hopefully have a larger update in the near future.

Animation coding was focused primarily on fixing exiting bugs to get the foundation as stable as possible, which will then be easier to build upon.

Design

At the beginning of the month we had a visit from Chris Roberts and a lot of other people from the all the studios. This was a great opportunity to make sure everyone is on the same track and we are all pulling in the same direction. While this might sound like an obvious thing, it’s actually really easy to lose that focus when you’re involved in problem solving for very tricky ground-level technical challenges for weeks on end. Lots of things got clarified on the design side and are reassured that our goals are aligned and the same processes needed to reach those goals.

On the Level Design side Andreas has taken over the Hurston landing zone. He will be focusing initially on the basic layout, positioning of important landmarks, vistas, landing pads and shops in the three layered zone. The Hurston landing zone is buried within the heavily industrial planet Hurston, owned by Hurston Dynamics in the Stanton system, but besides the actual Industrial Sector it also contains a Civilian Commons Sector and an extensive Business Sector.

The power distribution prototype that Clement was working on proved successful, so now he is moving forward to integrating life support systems and depressurization to this prototype. He is also extending the layout needed as more features get added to this test level.

On the System Design side we’ve been specing out some high priority systems needed for PU. We finished work on the Oxygen, Breathing & Stamina system that will handle the mechanics for how the oxygen travels from the suit’s tank to the suit’s internal capacity, through the lungs and into the blood stream and how the levels of oxygen in the player’s blood affect his actions, and also what happens when he runs out of oxygen.

We’ve also finalized designs on how Quantum Drives & Interdiction function and interact, and are also working on a global universe spawning system that will populate the star systems with content based on dynamic data from the Universe Simulator.

Another system that has been heavily looked at is loot generation and the actual looting system. We are trying to keep this as realistic & immersive as possible while trying to also have it still be manageable and entertaining for the player. This together with the work being done with Player Transactions should help us kickstart an early version of the economy in the PU.

On the AI design side, this month, we’ve started to receive tools that help us greatly in the process of building our behaviours and subsumption tasks so we have started working with these and hopefully our AI will greatly improve because of it.

Environment Art

This month environment art completed work on the (can’t say) which will feature in the (can’t say) of the game. They also started working on a wrecked version of the (can’t say) that will be used as set dressing in specific cinematic scenes. Making the wrecked version of the (can’t say) will involve taking the existing (can’t say) and adjusting the geometry and textures to simulate a smashed up and burnt look, while also using decals to really make it look like this thing has suffered some fairly intense damage.

They also continued supporting the Engine team on the procedural tech, further defining the pipeline and approach to get the finest level of detail possible.

BHVR

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Greetings Citizens,

From building the largest environments to growing the smallest space plants, Behaviour’s work ran the gamut this month!

Design

Behaviour’s Design team has been very busy this February. Starting with Hurston landing zone, we designed, blueprinted and whiteboxed all shop locations for the level, 10 in total and every designers chipped in. Good job guys! They are very different from what we did before as Hurston has its own visual signature and gameplay requirements. BHVR artists are going to start working on them soon and we can’t wait to see the result.

We are also helping out design, scope and plan for shopping which is a big priority for us. Regarding that, we made a few changes to the AR mode and AR labels, the more significant improvement will come with the shopping release but we got some very promising prototype on how this will look and feel. Even the March flair items will have AR information attached.

Talking about flair items, we gave a big push for flair hangar decoration this month, try to forge ahead. March will see the new flair collection revealed which will have 2 decorations: a subscriber one and even a stretch goal one. We even have a few more surprises in bank… To be continued.

Engineering

February has seen most of us working on polishing, debugging and optimizing various features for the 2.2.0 branch.

These include many fixes on contact list, hangar swapping loadouts, turret display in multi crew and holotable features.

Aside from that Adamo Maiorano has worked on Augmented Reality prototypes for the shopping experience and general AR changes to fit design changes.

Art

The Behaviour Art team has been finishing the available shops for Levski. Mostly polishing, dressing and creating props to give a distinct look and feel to each shop.

Also, we began work on performance optimisation to ensure a good frame rate for once NPC and players will be populating the level.

Lots of support was given to the 2.2 release, mostly fixing bugs and updating a few assets.

In addition, work continued on generic props for the lowtech style. These will be extremely useful for our many planets and SQ42 needs.

On the Concept art side, we began work on paintovers for the future Hurston shops.

Finally, the next flair objects has been completed for the next release.

Turbulent

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Greetings from freezing-rainy Montreal! Here’s what we’ve been up to in the last month:

Ship Stats

With over 70 ships currently listed on the site, the “Ship Stats” page needs a redesign with revamped readability and usability. We have gone back to the drawing board, creating a new user interface with additional search filters, allowing you to quickly find and compare the ships that interest you, as well as give better insight into the ship production pipeline. We are currently in the design phase, so we’ll post a screenshot in an upcoming report.

Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)

Last month, we continued our development of multi-factor authentication, i.e. best practices research, prototyping, and data modeling. Our objective is to upgrade our current authentication services and allow anyone to enable this added security feature. On the design front, we finalized the page layouts for the security settings section, which is where the user will setup MFA. In upcoming reports we’ll be able to go into more details about the foreseen short- and long-term options.

Communication Platform

We began brainstorming on a new communication platform for the site which would be able to aggregate and blend forum threads, chatrooms, private messaging into one hub. Our first step was to benchmark and rate other communication tools used by gamers and we are now starting the actual functional design process. Our aim is that this platform could be the next big functional step for Organizations.

Ship Happens

Last month, we updated the game packages on the website, so moving forward, Star Citizen and the upcoming Squadron 42 will be sold separately. It is important to note that his does not affect any packages that you already own; it applies only to packages sold after Feb 14.

Behind the Scenes

The Panic Service is live! Star Citizen devs are now able to access all crash data from this database, making it easier to extract the pertinent information.

Additionally we have been working with CIG to bring about the next big steps in persistence and how it will handle what everyone has on their website accounts. More on this as soon as we’re allowed to disclose anything!

Community

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Community… huh… yeah

What is it good for?

Absolutely everything, oh hoh, oh…

(YOU try starting one of these things…)

February went by in a blur like the short month that it is. Like always, it was a month of videos, forums, live events, perks, and more, so let’s dive right in.

Videos

The 10 For series reached another pinnacle when we had Sean Tracy and Steve Bender take over the show early this month. We knew it was going to be a spectacular trainwreck when we came up with the idea, and the boys didn’t disappoint. The variety of people it takes to make a game of this scope and quality continuously amazes me, and it delights me in equal measure when we can share those people with you, and show you that having fun in video games isn’t just for the people playing them.

Around the Verse continues to evolve with the inclusion of a more newcomer friendly hosting portion, remote video segments that allow us to showcase our developers around the world, and the return of fun segments like Which Glitch, and the Wonderful World of Star Citizen, where we showcase the community content creators on our flagship broadcast. In the coming weeks and months, you’ll see gamestreamers, youtubers, podcasters, ship builders and more highlighted on Around the Verse, as well as your gameplay videos front and center from now on in the opening of the show.

Reverse the Verse, our weekly informal livestream with the fans, is also evolving! Recent additions to the show include a new graphics and overlay package and a more structured format to the show. Response has been very positive so far, and keep watching as even more additions to the show come over the next few months.

Website

The RSI website continues to be the heart of Star Citizen-related conversation. Last month’s addition of the Shipyard section to the forums has taken off, small revisions to the Issue Council have helped us better track the bugs that affect your gameplay experience, and after a slight database issue that caused havoc with the upvote system in the Community Hub, that appears back on track. We’re hopeful to have continued iterations to both the Issue Council and Community Hub in the near future, and are even exploring options related to a major upgrade to our forums. No details to speak of just yet, but we continue to explore ways to improve all aspects of the Star Citizen experience during development… because that’s what development is for, yeah?

Live Events

No live events for the month of February, but we continue to make plans for our Gamescom and CitizenCon presence later this year. For Gamescom (Aug. 17-21) we’ll be on the show floor in our very own booth all five days, and are looking to host a number of pop-up parties in the evenings throughout the week, so stay tuned for more info on that as we get closer to the event. CitizenCon will be October 9th in Los Angeles at the Avalon Hollywood. The specific start time is still being determined, but we’ll have tickets up on the site for that in the coming weeks once all relevant details have been locked down.

Perks

Subscribers continue to get their monthly flair, and tune into Around the Verse next week to get a glimpse at a new flair series coming to subscribers that has us excited here.

Coda

That’s all we got for this month. We pretty much leave it all out on the field as they say in Sportsball. We’ll continue doing our best to generate and share as much Star Citizen content as we can with you each and every week. As always, a huge thanks to the 6 studios for taking the time to gather all this info for us to share with you.

See you in the ‘Verse!

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Quelle: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/tran…y-Studio-Report

Zitat von Star Citizen

Star Citizen Alpha 2.2 Available!

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Greetings Citizens,

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Star Citizen Alpha 2.2 is now available! All backers can access the latest patch on the Live server via the Star Citizen launcher. In addition to a host of bug fixes and balancing updates, Alpha 2.2 includes a number of ships, new features and gameplay elements! Ship updates include the flyable Sabre, damage states for the Freelancer and the hangar-ready Xi’An scout. The first major changes to the component system launch with this update with the addition of new coolers. The physical space around Crusader has also been updated, and individual instances now support up to 24 players at once. This release also marks the first iteration of a new hostility/reputation system, an initial party system and physicalized EVA. For a complete list of changes and additions, you can find the full patch notes here.

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[/article]

Reputation/Hostility System

“It Wasn’t Me… Honest!”

Your efforts repairing Comm Arrays in Crusader have not gone unnoticed by the corporation in charge of this region of space! Alpha 2.2 introduces the concept of “Monitored” space to the game, which are areas of the system that are actively being observed by Crusader Industries, Inc. These zones are centered around Cry-Astro, Port Olisar and any active Comm Arrays. By disabling COmm Arrays, you can toggle the space around them off in an area, allowing players to conduct nefarious deeds without observation. But watch out! Disabling a Comm Array is illegal, and any player attempting to do so will now be flagged as a criminal in this first iteration of the reputation/hostility system.

Destroying an empty ship, colliding with a landing ship (in Monitored space) or disabling a Comm Array now mark the offending character as a Level 1 Wanted Criminal. More serious crimes, including killing a player or destroying an occupied ship (in Monitored space) will add additional levels. Each level adds an extra 30 seconds of time out before a respawn. Want to reduce your criminal level? Waiting ten minutes without committing an additional offense reduces the level by 1, or you can ‘hack’ a console located at Security Post Kareah for the same result.

The corporate board at Crusader has a vested interest in keeping the Comm-Arrays online, and so they are now offering bounties for those who help protect their space by shooting down Level 5 Wanted Criminals. When a Level 5 Criminal is detected, all active players on the server then have the option to hunt them down, with a special reward for those that score the kill. When a Level 5 Criminal is destroyed, they are ejected from the server and must reconnect. Players aren’t the only one entering the fray, though: pirates and security forces now recognize and assist their friends and foes, and both will spawn to protect their interests (pirates at disabled Comm Arrays, Crusader Security at active stations.)

[/article]

Sabre Flight Ready

“Sabre Rattling.”

Did you miss out on your chance to pick up the now-flight-ready Sabre or the hangar-ready Khartu-al Scout during their concept sales? We’re making both ships available for sale again through Monday, March 7.

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Remember: we are offering these pledge ships to help fund Star Citizen’s development. The goal is to make additional ships available that give players a different experience rather than a particular advantage when the persistent universe launches. Ship types sold during limited sales will be available to earn in the finished game.

[/article]

Physicalized EVA

“I’m going out for some fresh air… ack… gasp…”

In many games, collision functions as a capsule-shaped mesh around the character model. You bump into a wall, and your character stops because your capsule collides with the wall.

In Star Citizen, the collision mesh is detailed to take a similar shape as the actual character model which allows us to utilize our rag-doll technology to affect individual limbs on collision with another object. If your character has a hand outstretched, the hand will encounter the wall and react realistically. Physical EVA also allows for the character model animations to be more responsive to what is taking place and the environment around you.

A great example of this is when a character EVA’s towards a surface feet-first. You will see the character’s feet hit the surface and tuck knees into its chest, as if it were bracing for impact.

The overall result is a more organic and dynamic experience for the viewer, and greater ability for CIG to use EVA as an active gameplay element.

[/article]

Keep Cool with Coolers

“Everybody be cool… YOU… be cool…”

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Those following Star Citizen’s development closely may know that the technical design team has been working on a long-term refactor of all ship components. With Alpha 2.2, we’re pleased to announce the first of these components is now online and functioning as intended: ship coolers! Coolers are used to dissipate the active heat built up from other components, currently primarily weapon system.

All ships include a generic cooler and we’ve also added two specialty units to the Voyager Direct store. The size 1 Wen/Cassel Endo and the J-Span Cryo-Star are both available for purchase and rental. Please note that all backers who signed up before the $56 million stretch goal will already have a J-Span Cryo-Star on their account! These coolers can currently be mounted on the Avenger, Aurora, Mustang, 300 Series, HOrnet, Gladiator, Gladius, M50 and P-52 Merlin.

• Wen/Cassel Endo Cooler
• J-Span Cryo-Star Cooler

Shields Down! (Temporarily)

“The Prefix Code is 1-6-3-0-9.”

One important ‘under the hood’ aspect of 2.2.0 is the start of our rollout towards the updated component system we’ve been working towards. As mentioned above, we have added a new set of Power Plants and Coolers to all existing ships, along with 2 aftermarket Coolers to Voyager Direct to start offering more loadout tuning options for each ship. Our next big step is going to be a rework to all of our Shield Generator components.

To prepare for that next step, we’re needing to make a few short-term changes to how Shield Generators interact with ships. For 2.2, we’ll be locking down the Shield Generators installed to each ship. Avenger shields are locked to Avengers, Mustang shields to Mustangs. Additionally, the current Seal Corp shields offered for sale on Voyager Direct will be temporarily disabled from use.

Now, since we’re temporarily taking something away from the current owners of these Seal Corp shields, we also wanted to take this chance to let everyone know the plans for how these existing purchases will convert into the new component system when the updated Shield Generators roll out.

Voyager Direct Shield Replacement Matrix

Old INK-Mark Shield	Old INK-Splash Shield	NEW Seal Corp WEB Shield
INK-MARK 104-ID	INK-SPLASH 104-IS	1x Seal Corp WEB Shield
INK-MARK 204-ID	INK-SPLASH 204-IS	2x Seal Corp WEB Shield
INK-MARK 304-ID	INK-SPLASH 304-IS	3x Seal Corp WEB Shield
INK-MARK 404-ID	INK-SPLASH 404-IS	4x Seal Corp WEB Shield

Overall, it’s a fairly clean exchange. We’ll be providing owners with 1 Small-sized Seal Corp WEB shield for each size of an existing shield you own. If it’s a Size 3 INK-Mark, you’ll get 3x WEB’s, a Size 2 INK-Splash will get you 2x WEB’s. These updated parts will be distributed out once the full Shield Generator update goes live in a future patch, and the existing items will still remain available (and eligible for this conversion) on Voyager Direct until then.

Bug Reporting

“I have problems.”

Remember, while there’s a lot to explore in Alpha 2.2 the game still just a portion of the Star Citizen experience! You can help the team improve future releases by reporting bugs and other issues using the Star Citizen Issue Council. The amazing feedback from Star Citizen backers is what has allowed us to interate on the PTU so quickly, and we’re eager for feedback about the Live release as well. You can access the Issue Council here.

Finally, we would be remiss if we not thank our incredible community of PTU testers for helping make this patch the best it can be! Your dedication is exemplary of the UEE’s finest defenders!

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Quelle: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/tran…ha-22-Available

Zitat von Star Citizen

Constellation & Freelancer Upgrades

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Greetings Citizens,

The attached article was originally printed in the January, 2016 issue of Jump Point. It offers a comprehensive overview of how Cloud Imperium Games’ artists and designers have updated two of our signature multicrew ships for Alpha 2.0!

Quelle: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/tran…lancer-Upgrades

Zitat von Star Citizen

10 for the Developers Episode 06

Kirk Tome and Darian Vorlick answer 10 questions from our development subscribers. But why only 8 timestamps…

00:46 – Technology of Xi’An Scout
06:19 – Alien Manufacturers
09:36 – Component System
19:58 – Knowledge of Producers
24:05 – Sizing Components
31:25 – Pressure with Patch Releases
38:48 – Coordinating Feature Releases
41:11 – Ship Size Affecting Planet Landing

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Quelle: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/tran…-The-Developers

Zitat von Star Citizen

Monthly Studio Report January

Greetings Citizens,

2016 is here, and we’re ready to rock! We kicked off the month with a series of summits in the UK and Los Angeles to prepare for the new year. There’s still one more to go, an AI summit in Frankfurt happening next week, but we’re ready to take on 2016! Now that our i’s are dotted and our t’s crossed, we’re ready to continue getting some great content out to the community. Specifically: going forward, you can expect to see regular updates to the Star Citizen Alpha. We are shooting for one significant patch each month. Expect to see this cycle repeated: numerous PTU test patches followed by a live release and then a lull as content for the next patch is prepared and integrated. As I write this, the team is working on content for Alpha 2.2. Expect to hear more about this release very soon! Meanwhile, here are the specifics of what each Star Citizen studio was working on in January…

CIG Los Angeles

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Greetings Citizens!

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Now that we have taken our first step into 2016, we have already started the year off with a big splash. January marked the release of Star Citizen 2.1.0, a continued evolution of the ground-breaking 2.0.0 release from last year. Additional world missions were added to the universe; however, the biggest stand-out feature was the additional two flyable ships: the Aegis Vanguard Warden and the long awaited MISC Freelancer. If you watched any of our streams last year, you would have witnessed the unveiling of the AEGIS Sabre. With the 2.1.0 release, for those who purchased the Sabre during its debut last year will find this sleek and beautiful space superiority fighter sitting in their hangar!

Along with the regular gamut of balances, fixes, and updates, below is our monthly report for CIG LA.

Engineering

January has been a busy month for the CIG LA Engineering team. The biggest milestone for all of the LA teams was the successful release of Star Citizen 2.1.0. Lead Engineer Paul Reindell has made solid progress on the item refactor collectively called Item System 2.0. Other regions are contributing to this new system and many preliminary features have been already released in order to provide a solid foundation for the Item System 2.0 and set the stage for its continued evolution. As mentioned in last month’s report, this feature provides greater control over itemization on the back end of the game. For January, Paul has implemented a physics controlling component that handles the physicalization of objects. This lives as a layer between the items and its physical proxy, interfacing how the physics mode of an object is changed (enabled, static, rigid, ragdoll, etc.).

Engineer Mark Abent has been industriously creating parameters for ammunition. With many of our systems moving away from strict XML and moving towards our own internal data management system, there’s a need to convert projectiles to this new management system. While outwardly, this will have no visible impact on the game itself, it changes how the parameters are loaded and allows us to move away from the XML project path.

Associate Engineer Chad Zamzow has been working on changes on how shields function. By making higher levels of shield health better at preventing damage, well-managed shields should provide a positive benefit over poorly/improperly managed shields – with the end goal of making lasers increasingly effective at depleting shields the more damage a shield takes and providing interesting decisions for players balancing regeneration speed, sheer strength, and signature in their shield generator options.

The new Interaction system has been worked on by our Engine Programmer Allen Chen, changing how interactions function. The current “Use” function in-game prevents us from adding more than one action to a single interactable object. Allen has completely decoupled the interaction logic to allow multiple actors to interact with a single object simultaneously.

Tech Design

“Ships galore!” should be the slogan for the CIG LA Tech Design team this month. With so many ships in the pipeline, it is difficult to decide where to start from.

One of the most anticipated ships so far, the 890 Jump, has just had its technical design documentation completed by Matt Sherman. Creating technical design documentation for the ship provides the artists with a template of specifications. Requisite information such as dimensions, hard points, internal volume, and various functionalities will ensure the artists are incorporating all of the necessary design elements.

Further development on the Xi’an Scout has reached the ‘grey box’ tech design phase. While the technical design documentation is akin to a “letter of intent” in that it is providing an idea of how the ship will function, the grey box stage is where the nitty gritty details of the ship begin to take shape. Lead Tech Designer Kirk Tome has given the Scout its overview such as its variants, characteristics – a comparison of various aspects of performance based on other ships of similar mass and design – and an idea of how the ergonomics of the cockpit will be laid out.

While Kirk continues with his design work on the Scout, he has also taken on the hefty task of refactoring the mass of every ship in-game. Definitely not a job for the faint at heart, Kirk has researched how to properly calculate the mass of our ships, and is now looking to apply these findings. With functional realism an end-goal of Star Citizen, we want to make sure all ships are using calculations ideal for the kind of materials our universe will contain. Whether they are far-future composite materials yet to be discovered or are composed of tried and true iron and steel, every one of these items will affect how ships move through the void.

Balance master Calix Reneau has also taken on a juggling task worthy of a traveling circus show. With our shield system being further iterated upon, Calix has created a metrics system to quantify shield performance. By allowing the Tech Design team to analyze these performance numbers, we can further fine tune how shields function not just as a whole, but also how they respond against various weapon types whether they are kinetic projectiles, energy-based attacks, or other exotic weapon types.

Art

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With the team beginning to fill out the shader libraries for MISC, it is no wonder the Reliant is shaping up to be one of our most stunning ships yet while also being one of our most collaborative multi studio efforts. Its unorthodox vertical shape has given our ship team a fresh canvas to exercise creative ideas for a creative design.

The MISC Reliant has been an all-hands-on-deck effort by the CIG LA Art team. Elwin Bachiller and Daniel Kamentsky have completed the exterior POMs and decals as well as generated almost all the geometry require to destroy it.

Concept artist Gurmukh Bhasin has been creating large renders to wallpaper our new building as we are still getting settled in to the new location. Each conference room will be given a different theme based on a ship manufacturer, and Gurmukh has been designing renders for how each room should look when the installations are completed. If you ever come by to take a tour of the place, make sure you check out our giant mural featuring the Vanguard. Given how much time we spend here, the investment in morale is well worth the effort!

Omar “Armani” Aweidah and Jeremiah “Versace” Lee, our in-game fashionistas, are creating uniform and clothing design for characters in-game. Creating an era-appropriate aesthetic for clothing while keeping certain elements familiar allows our players to identify and relate with the universe we have created. Not only do we want our ships to be the most epic spacecraft ever, we want to make sure our pilots, pirates, explorers, and ilk are geared appropriately for their chosen lot in the life of a Star Citizen. Jeremiah completed the medium armor concept, while Omar completed the high-poly geometry for the male navy BDU (Battle Dress Uniform).

Tech Content

Sean Tracy has migrated to the Los Angeles office, transplanting himself from Austin, Texas and has been making his mark with his Tech Content team.

Those who piloted or stood in proximity to a Constellation during the 2.1.0 PTU may have noticed drops in in-game performance. Matt Intrieri and Mark McCall have been fastidiously delving into the root cause of this performance issue. With 2.1.1, pilots of (and anyone standing in proximity to) a Constellation should notice a marked increase in game performance.

Further content refinements performed by Mr. McCall include adding LODs to normalize the mesh count for the Constellation as well as converting thrusters for all ships to .CDF format and add LODs to the thrusters.

Riggers Gaige Hallman and John Riggs (yes, we have a rigger named Riggs…how awesome is that?) have been working on putting processes in place. John has finalized the skinning vertices on characters while Gaige has been spending a little time each day performing some early Spring cleaning, organizing our character outsource submission management in Shotgun.

Finally, Patrick Salerno has also been proactively beautifying the Gladius by adding LODs to the Gladius to normalize the mesh count.

Production

Senior Producer Eric Kieron Davis is truly a man of many talents. One week he is in Austin, TX assisting the production team with Persistent Universe processes then another week he is spearheading the beautification of the new Los Angeles CIG office, all while keeping his eyes on the target of 2.1.0 and 2.1.1.

Mark Hong has fully settled in, another transplant from our Austin, TX office, has taken control of the Art and Technical Content teams as their producer while Randy Vazquez has filled in the much-needed role of Engineering and Tech Design producer. Randy’s familiarity with the design processes gives him a unique perspective on how best to manage the tasks of the Tech Design team, especially since Randy has both production and design experience under his belt. Production Assistant Darian Vorlick now fills a support role for the CIG LA team by providing data analytics, logistical reporting, as well as relieving any extraneous loads that may fall on the shoulders of the other producers.

Narrative

Our Head of Linear Content John Schimmel, Senior Writer Will Weisbaum and Lead Writer David Haddock were visiting the UK office for a few weeks to sync back up with the designers as well as discuss the production of Squadron 42. They were able to address all of the narrative items of the story and adjust based on new insights as the in-game tech advances. On the Persistent Universe front, as more landing zones are in the process of being built, they have been delving deeper into the look and feel of the locations, characters and even how in-game fictitious products are advertised and branded.

In addition to writing Jump Point articles and News Updates, Associate Writer Adam Wieser tackled a pretty massive S42 task: conforming the scripts to accurately reflect the dialogue recorded during last year’s performance shoot. A laborious process for sure, but now that it’s complete, the designers will no longer need to hunt down footage to see how scenes played out.

Archivist Cherie Heiberg continued to work with our science consultants who have been generating data based on the various planets and systems in the Star Citizen universe while waging her colossal battle against the monstrous hydra known as disorganization and confusion. Our internal wiki is their battlefield. It’s like Thunderdome. Two will enter. One will leave.

Conclusion

With the first 30 days of 2016 behind us, we still have another 335 left to go. That leaves us plenty of time for new ships, new features, new missions, and new art to make its way into the universe. February is looking to be just as exciting and we can’t wait until we can bring you a month in review next time. We are making video game history, and all of you are at the center of it!

CIG Austin

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Howdy Citizens,

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The New Year is behind us and teams are in full swing planning, developing, testing, and launching new content for the game. We have had several team members in the LA studio this month for substantial in-person collaboration and planning efforts, and we’ve received a ton of new content for testing and publishing. After substantial testing we launched the 2.1.0 version to the Live server, and have made subsequent updates to tweak and tune the experience. We’re looking ahead to the 2.2.0 update which is soon to come! Here are some detailed updates from each group in Austin.

Persistent Universe Team

The keyword for this month has been ROADMAP. Lots of scheduling and planning has been going on this month for 2016, and we’ve made good progress in laying down a roadmap for features and content. Mark Skelton and Tony Zurovec have been in LA the last couple of weeks meeting with Chris Roberts, Erin Roberts, and others to ensure that all of our goals are lined up and clear to everyone.

That being said, roadmaps and schedules weren’t the only thing we worked on this month. We’ve identified the hero landing zones, smaller landing zones, and space content we want to bring online this year, but the ones that are currently in progress are tracking along nicely. The Levski landing zone in Nyx is in Final Art Stage, and we are now putting the finishing touches on the Shops we’ll have there, including Cordry’s (armor), Conscientious Objects (personal weapons), Café Musain (bar), and the Medical Unit. Initial VFX and Lighting passes are under way for those environments and they are looking absolutely beautimous in their own grimy, decrepit kinda way.

Looking forward, we’ve been putting some hard design focus on creating blueprint documentation for the next hero landing zone on the horizon, the Stanton>Hurston>Lorville landing zone (that’s the Lorville landing zone on planet Hurston in the Stanton system, for those of you who’ve been enjoying the Starmap). Rob Reininger has been working with BHVR to layout the blueprints for the various shops for Hurston, as well as the layout for the city of Lorville itself. We’re excited about the design opportunities that have presented themselves for this environment and are taking full advantage. We’ve also been doing some pre-visualization for Hurston. Mark Skelton has been going back and forth with BHVR over the art direction of this environment, and Corentin Chevanne, Art Director at BHVR, and his crew have been doing an excellent job nailing that aesthetic. We’re excited to jump on to this landing zone after we wrap up work on Levski.

In Ship Land, Chris Smith and Josh Coons have been chugging away on the Xi’an Scout (or Khartu-Al). Emre has been working with them to finish up his initial lighting pass on it and it is looking pretty slick. We’re aiming to finish up this ship in the very near future, at which point we will move on to our next focus, revamping the original 3 ships in Arena Commander (the Aurora, 300i, and Hornet) to match our current quality standards.

On the Ship Animation side, in conjunction with Art we’ve been working on enter and exit cockpit animations for the Scout in preparation for its hangar-ready release. These animations are completely unique, since this type of ship is the first of its kind that we’ve done. In addition we are implementing a new cockpit type control scheme for this ship: The Dual Orb. On the PU side, we’ve wrapped up work on the Medical Unit animations and have been making some nice progress on the Nightclub scene animations. We’ve got NPC’s leaning against walls, sitting at booths, drinking at bars, using vending machines, and even using the toilet!

As mentioned previously, Tony Zurovec has been in LA for the past couple of weeks meeting with the other Directors to discuss high-level Design goals for 2016. There are several exciting features that are being discussed that we will aim to bring online this year. I won’t mention them here just yet but look forward to updates on these features soon. Another part of the planning that Tony has been going over with Chris is the Backend Networking/Server roadmap for the year. Jason Ely and Jeff Zhu are fully focused on Persistence right now, and will be for a while longer, but there are several core backend systems that need to be developed this year in order to make significant leaps forward in the PU. For example, Tom Sawyer just finished wrapping up work on improvements to the Party System, and will now be writing a TDD for the work to be done on his next focus, the “True Friends System.” More on that next month!

Live Operations

QA

After a well-deserved break, QA began January with focusing testing efforts on the deployment of 2.1.0 to the live environment. After five deployments to the PTU, we were very happy to finally deploy 2.1.0 to live.

This month we have gained 2 new recruits. Please welcome Jeff Daily and Katarzyna Mierostawska. Jeff comes to us from NCSoft where he worked on many titles as QA Lead. Katarzyna worked with many titles as well including Trion World’s Archeage where she obtained Cryengine testing experience.

Training new additions to the team is a significant undertaking but Tyler Witkin and Melissa Estrada are up to the task and doing a great job.

After deploying 2.1.0 to the live environment QA began testing the game-dev development branch which will eventually become 2.2.0. Todd Raffray headed up a comprehensive test of Party System updates and improvements.

Meanwhile, Vincent Sinatra and Andrew Hesse have completed additional investigations for designer Calix Reneau involving ship speeds, time to kill, and flight mechanics. Vincent and Andrew have also been supporting daily developer playtests in the LA studio which have resulted in very valuable feedback.

This month we had two visitors from our QA team from the Foundry 42 studio in Manchester Glenn Kneale and Andrew Mawdsley. Glenn and Andrew sat down with Jeffrey Pease and learned how to effectively monitor and report issues with our back end services.

Just prior to the month’s conclusion, we tested and deployed a small hotfix (2.1.2) to the PTU and then to the live environment. We are now squarely focused on testing new additions and updates in the game-dev branch which will become 2.2.0. The entire QA team is doing some really great work and we are all looking forward to getting 2.2.0 out to everyone as soon as possible.

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Game Support

January saw the rollout of 2.1.0 (and subsequently, 2.1.1 and 2.1.2) to our players. Chris Danks and Will Leverett in Game Support worked alongside Production, QA, and Live Ops to feverishly put out daily builds to get tested, assessed, fixed, and finally pushed to Live. We’re excited to see the reception it’s received, and we’ll continue to make additional fixes on the road to 2.2.0 next month.

Game Support also has been focused on the general work of catching up from the holidays. Most of this work is complete, and we’re happy to provide faster turnarounds for players who send in technical-related tickets.

On a related note, we’ve also been pushing hard to get caught up on our hacked accounts. We feel this is a good time to remind players that we do not condone buying and selling of pledges using the gifting system, in fact we actively discourage it. This is one area where we cannot promise and you should not expect that we can or must address a given ticket. The gifting mechanism is not intended for this use, and not only can CIG not monitor a third party transaction, you are exposing yourself to a risk where you may not be able to recover your funds if the other party has malicious intent.

Lastly, we’ve been working with company leadership to discuss our plans for growth in 2016. We’re excited about growing our team both in Manchester, UK and in Austin, Texas, and we’ll be looking for some top talent to help us run the BDSSE in the next few months. Stay tuned!

IT/Operations

January has been fun for us all here on the IT team. First and most importantly, nothing broke down! We all feel quite a sense of relief over the stability of our networks now with all the work that has been done at each studio to accommodate the large bursts of data for the builds and publishes. Normally, a network of this size and complexity requires constant tuning and maintaining, particularly with all the requirements and overhead involved with secure communications between studios. This year over our holiday however, the IT team didn’t even receive a single alert which is how it should be of course, but this is the first year for us that we’ve experienced such a smooth holiday vacation.

This month went by very quickly but toward the end, we got to meet up with some really great groups of backers. It was fun to spend time chatting with them about some of the details about how the build system works and the cool systems we made which allow us to replicate petabytes of data between the studios. To those of you who were here, thanks for coming and we’re looking forward to your next visit.

Live Ops

Kicking off the first month of 2016 has been very productive in the LiveOps team. We published version 2.1 to the live service 3 times in January with 9 publishes to the PTU. We’ve also reconfigured our desks to make room for more growth on the team and just because it feels good to clean everything at the beginning of the year.

Major progress has been made on tools that support the build process. This month has seen the most impressive updates in the form of interface and usability. These important changes will allow us to push more control out to the dev teams so they don’t have to request every single change from us directly. Additionally, we’ve nearly completed our work on the public crash handler which should be incorporated in to the game in February if all goes well. We expect this will produce a wealth of information for the dev team with regards to any client crashes – this information will help them hunt down and fix those client crash bugs once and for all. Finally, we’re also finishing our work on a new type of build which we hope will have an impact on client load times. If we do well in testing, we’re hoping to get these new builds in to the pipeline in February as well.

Foundry 42 UK

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Greetings Citizens,

Let’s get right to it! Here’s what we’ve been doing at Foundry 42 in the new year:

Art

Concepts

A relatively slow month of production due to Christmas holidays eating into a good portion of the month, however true to form and CIG style we hit the ground running with 2 weeks of planning meetings for the hurdles we face this year.

One aspect of the planning was trying to give the concept team a smoother ride; in the past we’ve had to adopt a fairly reactive flow, whereas this year I’d like to know 3-6 months in advance – we have the work that’s for sure!

This month the team has covered finishing off the Javelin exterior, Idris/Javelin turrets, Shubin corridor and main bridge, low tech props, asteroid outpost garage interior and Apocalypse Arms rail gun (first pass).

Character Team

The pressure is on! Forrest has been visiting and giving the guys a good understanding of the new pipeline and has done a stellar job on working with associate producer Andy to get a comprehensive schedule together. In terms of art work, “Randall Graves” is now close to in-game final and the Bridge Officers uniform high poly is looking top notch too.

Environments

Most of January has been picking up the whiteboxing phase for the environments in Sq42, we’re making all the big changes to the layout, composition, vistas and flow in this period as everything is very malleable. It’s really promising seeing how all our big set piece events will play out, and how the player will traverse through the various locations in the game. Our PU team has also started whiteboxing out a new location for Crusader which will feature a familiar character. This is going to be a cool one and we’re going to take it into full production next month. Work is also progressing on our testbed for asteroid bases, the look development for the terrain is now complete and now we’re applying this to the rest of the landscape.

Ship Art

There’s plenty of spaceship action going on at Foundry 42! We’re getting in to the final art stages of production with the Sabre and StarFarer. The StarFarer is rather large with lots of interior work so she’s going to take a little longer but we hope to have the Sabre flying around Crusader very soon.

It’s exciting times in the land of Capital Ships. We’ve got resources back on to the Idris to get her ship shape with the Javelin and Bengal getting their whitebox work well underway. We can’t wait to get these babies flying!

VFX

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We certainly hit the ground running after the Christmas break! Adam has been focusing on some “thruster standardisation” tasks. There are a number of inconsistencies that we want to smooth out across all thrusters in the game; one example would be some thruster effects having no idle effect , where others do (when the ship is “on” but not thrusting) – we are going to make sure all idle thrusters have a glow to show the thing is powered up. Another part of this task is the creation of boost effects, so there is clear visual feedback to show the difference between boost and standard thrust. This wasn’t previously possible, so Adam has been working closely with John Pritchett to give us improved functionality to really enhance our thruster effects.

Away from thrusters, Mike has been working on a cleaned-up, simplified VFX style guide. This is a concise document that clearly lays out the expected visual style for our VFX artists to adhere to, ensuring visual consistency across the whole range of effects we make (and let’s face it, we make a LOT of effects here!) – it also gives us a very clear visual language for different manufacturers and races. Mike has also been working on cleaning up the effects “templates” and building up our libraries so designers and artists have a greater range of effects to choose from when fleshing out their levels, weapons etc.

Collectively, the VFX team have begun looking in earnest at the effects requirements for Squadron 42 – no spoilers here but suffice to say we have some spectacular scenarios throughout the campaign. I can tell you there will be explosions. Lots of explosions. Did I mention there are going to be explosions?

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Prop Art

The Props team has been continuing to focus on the ship components, we are just putting the finishing touches on the third. We have however had a slight change of heart with how we approach the materials. After consulting the Character and Weapon teams we are now looking to use the same layer material they use, this allows us to achieve a much higher quality surface on the components and it has the added benefit of being much cheaper rendering wise. We will need to revisit our original components but the work is fairly quick and the benefits are well worth it.

We also hope to make use of this layer material in other areas of prop production which will ultimately mean we can throw more on screen than before, a bit of investigation work is in order next month.

With the prop audit coming to a close we have started to do a polish pass on some of the older and commonly used assets, with the aim of improving the quality and performance in one hit.

Work had begun on supporting the Squadron levels and we are working closely with the environment team building some of the key props they require.

Finally work has commenced on the next set of flair assets for our subscribers hangars, we are planning something a bit different in the next couple of months so we are trying to get a head start now.

Design

Wow! January went past at 100 miles-an-hour and the UK design team have been busy in all areas of the game. Systems design is still refactoring the UI for the HUD to give new players a less steep learning curve into the game. It’s not just the HUD that needs an easy option as we are also looking at all of the usability aspects of the game in relation to new players, such as USE prompts, inner-thought, controls unification, better on-foot navigation aids and augmented reality.

As part of this process we are giving mobiGlas some much needed design love, doing a full sanity pass through all of the apps we will need, the priorities being the ones required for the military version for Squadron 42 and the shopping experience.

With the StarFarer coming out soon, we are looking to get the fuel collection gameplay tiered up so Players will have some interesting things to do with this beast of a ship in the coming Live releases.

The Tech designers are still bashing away on all of the new ships and having some extra bodies in that department is starting to pay off in terms of getting the ships flight ready sooner.

From this month we are going to have a dedicated Ship Balance Designer who can act upon feedback in terms of where ships fit in the overall game. This is going to be a very important role going forward and will require a lot of trial and error before the ships feel how they are supposed to, but it’s great that someone is now going to be responsible for this on a daily basis.

I can’t say too much about S42 as you know, but we had Chris Roberts and the writing team over here for the first two weeks of January and we are very happy with how the campaign is paced for design now.

Engineering

Some good progress has been made on some of the core systems this month which will all go and help make the game easier to maintain as well as fix some of those annoying little bugs that crop up from time to time.

The hardest part of the job sometimes is just knowing what to call something. For example, in the current version of a game when vehicles get created, either when you or somebody else requests a ship, or when AI spawn in, it’s actually quite an inefficient process on the networking side. The client first comes up with a list of what the required loadout is and sends it to the server, the server then creates the ship with all the individual items (which can be over 100 depending on the ship), the server then serializes all these items to all the clients (a fancy way of saying it makes sure they both are synchronised with the same information) one at a time. This has led to a lot of pain in past to get all of this working, as the CryEngine wasn’t designed to dynamically create vehicles like this, and it ended up with a lot of hard to track down bugs. A number of these were caused because the ship on the client could be built in a different order than on the server depending on what order the packets came through. We’re now doing away with all of that and coming up with a solution where we just have one packet of information which describes the whole vehicle and how it is set up. This packet is sent to the clients in one go and used by both the server and the client to build the ship. Now we have the advantage that there’s a lot less network traffic required, and because the server and all clients build the vehicle in exactly the same way it is completely deterministic which means it’s a lot more robust and easier to track down any problems. We were going to call this new packet a Spawn Bundle, but that that got confused with the AISpawnBundle we already have, we then started calling it Dependent Entity Spawn Helper, which doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue, so now we’re using the Loadout Helper, which we’re not really happy with either. So it’ll probably change again. (If you don’t think this is a big deal, consider that the name of a module or subroutine may be employed across multiple files across millions of lines of code across different code development branches being used by different teams that need merging before a release. And yet, a reliable and ordered naming convention is extremely important for internal consistency because if the names don’t make intuitive or engineering sense, it’s harder and slower for newcomers to get up to snuff on a system that’s become too idiosyncratic.)

The Object Container work (which similarly had gone through numerous renames) is making some good progress. We’ve now got proof of principle where we can export a level as an object container and get it to load into the game correctly. Now we begin the fun part of trying to split the level up into multiple containers and getting them to stream in and out of memory, which is where we start to break everything. We’ll also be working on converting the prefabs over and getting the containers working with the Zone System. Once all of that is in it will allow us to greatly expand the scope of a level.

Otherwise it’s pretty much carrying on as usual. The audio guys are currently trying to track down a really nasty audio corruption bug which you might have heard. It’s proving really tricky as it’s very hard to reproduce, our QA only hear it after playing the game for around 4 hours in a session with a full server so we might only get it once or twice a day. It ends up that the turnaround time between creating a new build with some additional debugging, or potential fixes, and seeing what happens becomes very drawn out. We have started to narrow down what is going on though and we’re confident we can get it fixed shortly.

Graphics

Last month a lot of our focus was on improving performance and we’ve managed to make significant improvements on existing scenes/ships but also on our newer and more complex assets that are still in production. Some of our recent big wins have come from fixing various issues on the Constellations and Retaliators room setup to ensure they’re properly occluded from outside the ship, and to heavily optimise the UI of both ships (we now render less than ¼ of the number of meshes for the holo-UI for the exact same visual result).

This month the leads have been planning the long term schedule for the year, and the graphics team have had to determine the graphics requirements of all the other teams (art, vfx, design, gameplay) and ensure we’ve planned out all the required features. While doing this the rest of the graphics team have been focussing on newer features, starting with our revival of the gas cloud tech that will be vital for both Squadron 42 and the PU. The gas cloud tech will continue to be one of our main priorities for the next couple of months, and at the moment we’re focussing on researching efficient volumetric lighting techniques and trying to get the look and feel right before getting into the optimisations and polish stages further down the line. Other new features we’re starting on are improvements to some of the shaders such as glass and skin, a new version of our LOD merging tool to optimise space stations and FPS environments, improved fire/glow on particle effects, and a completely new physically based glare & lens-flare system.

Animation

Here in the UK we have been working on core FPS player mechanics. We’ve been setting up some of the aim pose requirements for technical implementation of cover low and cover high systems. We’ve also been reworking the no weapon locomotion turns to add in some weight to the animation in 3rd person while keeping the camera steady in first person. An interesting challenge in itself when gameplay requires turning on the spot!

Further adjustments to core gameplay requirements have been lowering the crouch locomotion set to better fit the height metric set by design. This will allow idle and locomotion to keep below cover height, instead of your head popping up when you start to move. We’ve also started to look in to implementation of the vault and mantling mechanics, reviewing the motion capture data and working with design and code on the best way to break it up to allow for a smooth gameplay experience.

Animation

Here in the UK we have been working on core FPS player mechanics. We’ve been setting up some of the aim pose requirements for technical implementation of cover low and cover high systems. We’ve also been reworking the no weapon locomotion turns to add in some weight to the animation in 3rd person while keeping the camera steady in first person. An interesting challenge in itself when gameplay requires turning on the spot!

Further adjustments to core gameplay requirements have been lowering the crouch locomotion set to better fit the height metric set by design. This will allow idle and locomotion to keep below cover height, instead of your head popping up when you start to move. We’ve also started to look in to implementation of the vault and mantling mechanics, reviewing the motion capture data and working with design and code on the best way to break it up to allow for a smooth gameplay experience.

Other than that we’ve been planning for the year ahead, and providing some body data for cinematics over in Frankfurt to unblock them.

Audio

Here in CIG Audio, we’ve spent a lot of time tracking down an issue that’s affected the sound experience in the live release; wholesale and rather nasty distortion, that typically happens only after a reasonably lengthy play session.

It’s been difficult to discern the cause up until this week, but we think we have a solution and we’re rolling that out as soon as we can. We’ve had help from the community in tracking this one down, and have to thank all involved who went above and beyond the call of duty in sending us their data files and reporting the issue in such detail – it’s awesome to work hand in hand with you all. We’ve also had some great assistance from Audiokinetic’s support department who’ve pitched in wherever they can. It’s been a trying time for Graham, Sam and Mikhail in doing the necessary detective work and our QA team have also been of great assistance here. We’ll write up a more detailed report of it for those interested later once we have a fuller picture.

As you can imagine, this has curtailed some of our progress on the system side and has highlighted just how much we need audio programming engineers; as well as this issue bringing this to the fore, we’ve put together our entire audio engineering roadmap to feed into the wider code schedule and it includes much of what is discussed on the Ask A Dev forum and far more besides – there are a lot of foundations still to put down to cater for a universe as huge as ours, lots of variables to cater for and you can never quite know what they might be until the game hits the live servers.

So on the topic, we have a role available here at Foundry 42 for a Senior Audio Programmer, and one can apply via the CIG website!

Otherwise, work has continued where possible on Squadron 42, with Ross putting down as much as he can there, setting some markers for how that workflow should be, and continuing on the music logic system with Sam. Ship work is continually ongoing via Darren and Luke. Stefan’s been refining the impacts of ship-based weapons – he’s looking at making them more dangerous when you’re in EVA or generally unshielded by a ship. Matteo’s continued with Foley work for characters, Phil has been putting together one of the most awesome rigs ever for p-cap dialogue capture purposes, Bob’s been hard at it speccing up our dialogue system/database. Jason’s been assisting with that and looking to proximity based VOIP tech. I’ve been arranging as much as I can for a forthcoming orchestral performance session, and also working with everyone on a bit of everything.

Hopefully with this nasty bug out the way we can get back to more gainful work in building up the systems and content. Thanks for listening!

QA

UK QA have been split between the testing of Star Citizen Future and Present this month – with us covering the current release streams of 2.1.0 (via 2.1.1 and 2.1.2) as well as the more developmental stream where the new upcoming features work is being done. At the time of writing this, 2.1.2 is about to go LIVE – so we’re all feeling happy in the knowledge that it’s been a good months’ work well done!

In terms of our biggest, most difficult to catch bug this month; we’ve been devoting a lot of time to the reproduction of the audio corruption and subsequent crash that’s been happening in 2.1.0 and 2.1.1. This has been some quite involved work for the UK test team – which has required frequent communication with the audio programmers as well as needing us to be sat in the PTU and LIVE servers, trying to force the issue to occur – with the help of many a backer. So thanks again!

This is also Andy Nicholson’s last month working as the QA Manager in the UK – Phil Webster will be taking his place in the coming week. Andy’s SC journey will continue, albeit in a new form with the Design team – but as QA Manager he leaves a legacy of creating a really great QA team.

And now it’s time to sign off. SPACESHIPLAUNCHSFXNOISES!

Foundry 42 Frankfurt

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Greetings Citizens,

Hello from Frankfurt! Our main focus for January has been to re-iterate on the goals set throughout December and ensure we are still on track with them. For that we had a few meetings to discuss priorities so everyone was on the same page what to work on next. We slowly ramped-up on the focus so everyone could get back into their zone and work without interruption as much as possible. FPS, PU design, Cinematics, AI and core engine development progress so far within the first few weeks of 2016 has been quite impressive and you can find more details in the respective reports from our team.

Production

The production team started the month with a lot of planning sessions. Having ended the year with our massive 2.0.0 update, introducing some key features of our game, we want to ensure that 2016 will be aequally as exciting for everyone. We met with the Directors and the team to talk about what high level goals we want to achieve, and when they’ll be completed, throughout 2016. We then prioritized and matched the tasks against our available resources. Talks with the team are still going on to break the goals down into achievable steps. Going through this process is taking a lot of time and since we also have to continue working on the updates/bug fixes for the live game it’s something that needs to be scheduled carefully to allow the team to prepare properly while keeping interruption on their current work as low as possible. On the AI side we are almost completed and will have a first draft roadmap ready within the next few days. This will cover all requirements for S42 but also PU and we have a lot of really interesting features and systems ready to be worked on. Follow-up discussions will happen with other departments of the team where dependencies need to be clarified. FPS, PU design and core engine development are on a good way, but all need prioritization and breaking the work down further before we can pull together a final plan.

Code

Hi everyone, a new year starts with new technological challenges. We released 2.0 in December and 2.1 in January, each accompanied by a PTU phase before they went live. Star Citizen nowadays has a size of ~30GB, which means that with the current patch model, the backers have to download a load of data (Especially on the PTU where we want as many people as possible to make the game stable prior to going live). The size is the same internally for us, as even a 1GBit LAN connection cannot transfer 30 GB instantly. Hence we in Frankfurt collaborated with our Austin engineers on how to tackle this problem. We came up with a good solution in which we all believe in and have started to implement. The idea is to design a system which knows your local data, knows what data should be in the build, and then selectively downloads and updates your local data set to match the one of the build. For example, if between two PTU release, zero textures are changed, then no texture will be downloaded, reducing the required download by several GB. We hope to start testing this system soon internally and then extend it to our public releases as well. Unfortunately, as this is part an integration process which often tend to have many small issues which add up to a lot of time, I can only give you Soon™ as an estimate.

EVA was also a major focus! For extra vehicular activities (EVA) the player model is basically a ragdoll which is 100% controlled by physical impulses. This type of “ragdoll” can be driven by animation and is able to perform all actions needed for a player character. All physics-based control models can be unpredictable in certain situations: for example, whenever legs collide with an obstacle the character is doing somersaults and sliding along walls always makes the view spin around. This behavior is physically correct and pretty much identical to what happens when parts of a ship collide with an obstacles in space. But if this happens in first person view, then it’s not exactly what a player expects. In the last weeks we investigated (with the help of UK and LA) different control methods for the EVA suit that preserves the physicality of the ragdoll simulation and while still giving the player more precise controls for navigation and EVA combat. This includes:

• Improved “view-based control mode” without drifting. This control mode is very similar to John Pritchett’s thruster controls for ships.
• Improved Yaw-Pitch controls that reduced the “camera roll”.
• Better capabilities to slide along walls by reducing the friction on the suit and using counter forces to stabilize spinning automatically.
• Weapon aiming in vertical and horizontal poses for driven ragdolls
• New IK-system for driven ragdolls. Whenever the legs collide with the environment, the character can pull them up immediately.
• Experimental auto-navigation methods that makes it easier to move around in tighter spaces without getting stuck in level geometry.

Finally, we continued working on the procedural planet environment and trying different combinations to improve the planets overall appearances. We’re making great progress and look forward to showing things off in the future.

AI

Since AI didn’t provide a large update for December due to the holiday, we’ll focus on the general progress we made since last month.

On the character side we completed the first pass on the implementation of the functionalities required to allow enemies to use covers during their combat behaviors. Animators have provided us animations for staying in cover, shooting from cover, peeking from cover, and firing blindly at their target. The behaviors can now correctly request functionalities such as peeking or shooting from cover. The system will take care of analysing the current position in relation of the target position selecting the proper posture to use.

We also started to refactor the character perception. We’re basically creating a perception system that can be modularized directly in the game code. Components will register the different entities into the system that will allow them to perceive through different senses. Vision has been the first to be tackled, we started using the CryEngine VisionMap and we created a game component that registers an entity as an Observer or Observable. This allow us to specify what we’re interested in seeing, and how other characters can perceive us so the vision map can take care of making physical checks and caching information for queries. We will share more details about this in the upcoming weeks!

On the behavior side we have exposed a lot of functionalities through new behavior nodes and extended the current behavior we’re using. We also started using the TokenSystem we previously talked about to create the foundation for the first coordination. With the TokenSystem we’re experimenting with coordinating agents during the investigation of dangerous sounds, having one person going to investigate while the other covers him and wait for his information, etc.

Regarding the spaceships AI, we have moved all the spawning logic from LUA to C++. This will allow us to maintain the system better and it already helped us by properly supporting the asynchronous entity spawning.

In addition to all of that we have been working on a lot of stability improvements and we have worked on the creation of a development plan for 2016 and beyond!

Build Engineering

Our Senior Build Engineer has been busy in general working on the build system, trybuild and automation. This month a good amount of time was spent on general build issues that generally come up throughout development. He also worked on a few changes that will allow us to switch over to updated software once it’s released.

QA

This month Chris Speak has been progressing on Automated testing setups for CryEngine, primarily focused on AI and the way it handles obstacles within a level as well as the Usables such as vaulting over walls and climbing ladders using a relatively simple Flowgraph module. He setup a test-map that contains several feature tests that can be triggered via the console within both the Editor as well as in Client mode that tells an AI character to move towards a specific target location, and upon entering that location the FeatureTest node in Flowgraph marks the test as complete. The AI has to determine how to navigate to that target area using the obstacles in front of it, so in the case of the screenshot below it needs to climb two 4 meter ladders to reach the target.

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He’s also been recording timed demos for the purposes of automating end-user-experience testing to give us daily feedback relating to everything from ship boarding and flight, to FPS combat etc. This should give us a good foundation for future changes, and make changes to the game-code a bit less risky and painful.

Cinematics

Cinematics is currently at work on several scenes that happen during S42’s story’s beginning. We’ve done a first pass on our Navy hospital scenes and are currently doing previs on a few others that we can’t discuss just yet. Our Sr. Environment artists are busy building up terrain, as well as environment and key props for a dramatic planetside scene. The scene is fairly prominent and we need to make room for an Idris to land. We also started with a major facelift, as well as under-the-hood work, on the Trackview editor, one of the main tools use by the cinematic designers. Sascha Hoba is currently busy bringing the toolset up to speed for what we need it to do, both in usability and feature set. The additional functionality will make certain areas more efficient for the team, and allow us to assemble scenes quicker.

Design

For Level Design work continues on the prototypes for the Modular Environments and the Power Management Systems, we are pretty close to having the latter ready for an internal play test to verify the concept. It should turn out to be a pretty interesting, a dynamic and fun way for the players to interact with the environments in everything from Space Stations to planetary outposts, just make sure you don’t turn off the lights while someone is still in the SpaceLoo™, bad things might happen.

As with development life in general we sometimes encounter bugs and blockers that might temporarily halt our work in one area, but there is always work to be done fill those small gaps, so in the last month we have also been doing some work on a small multiplayer map, defining game rules for multiplayer (line of sights, density of obstacles, height variations, scale) as well as scheduling and planning for 2016.

This last month System Design has been focused on getting a thorough breakdown of all the systems that we need for Star Citizen, past, present and future. This would allow us to verify and better see what systems are used the most and in which specific situations so we can better prioritise them.

Besides that we’ve been working on various cargo prototypes to decide what is the perfect balance between doing things as realistically as possible while making sure cargo movement and management is still fun and exciting to do. Other systems that we are pushing for right now are looting and resource spawn management as these will allow us to improve the PU experience greatly. We’ve also had a new addition to our team, Grégoire, a great designer from France, he’s been trying to catch up with the massive amount of documentation so that next month he is 100% up to date, while at the same time trying to get familiar with all the internal tools we use on a daily basis.

On top of all this we are continuing to interview great applicants and talent to fill the ranks of the expanding Frankfurt Design team.

Weapons

We have been working with the concept art team on a new FPS weapon, it’s going well and looks good, but It is still in a very early concept stage.

Also the updated metrics for ship mounted and personal weapons have been completed after being evaluated by various departments and are ready to be used.

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Audio

This month Mikhail spent most of the time on bug fixes and refactoring AudioSystem so that it uses the ZoneSystem for all relevant positional information. It turned out to be a fair bit of work, because, like most currently existing audio systems, CrySoundSystem was designed under an implicit assumption that audio sources are mostly static, and the ones that aren’t inform the audio system explicitly when their positions change. This works well for the majority of 3D-engine-based games in existence. Naturally, like with many other things, Star Citizen is a different case. Since a lot of action in the game happens inside the spaceships, there is no reason to expect the audio sources in any particular frame to be static, in fact, more often than not they are all moving, and, sometimes, for example when landing on a capital ship, there might be several clusters of audio sources all moving at different speeds relative to the listener. This not only applies to the permanent audio sources like thrusters, ship weapons, doors etc., but also the transient ones, like footsteps, object collisions, electrical sparks. As you can imagine, when the standard approach is used, the number of position updates required quickly adds up and starts to affect the overall performance. On the other hand, the Zone System provides the engine modules with a centralized and efficient way to keep track of the positional information for the objects they need, so querying it once per frame for the positions of all audible sources based on the current listener’s position is definitely a much more scalable solution.

Art

This month Robert Stephens has been concentrating on the escape pod used in the Javelin Destroyer. Even though it’s only a small / minor craft in comparison to some of the larger ships, we’re spending the time we need to give it the level of detail fans and backers have come to expect. A good amount of time was spent on how the pod doors will open / close, we want to have both a complex and accurately stylize locking mechanism that the player can easily use and recognize. Some of the challenges with something like this is making it look as though it would work if it existed in real life, and also balancing that with the requirements of other departments such as animation so that the character can actually get in and out of the pod easily.

Pascal Muller has been working on art for the procedural planet tech. This involves a lot of iterating and figuring out what works on a technical level as well as getting it to look as good as possible. The main difficulty is to make it read visually no matter how far or how close you are to the planet. To make this work there are multiple levels of detail which blend in and out depending on your distance to the surface in a very particular way. Can’t say much more about it at this point except that we can’t wait to share it with everyone.

Tech Art

As part of our character pipeline, this month we divided or character data files into three separate units, _SRC, _PUB, and _BND files. The SRC file stores the render mesh and skeleton data, PUB stores the puppet rig, and _BND file helps us to map our FBX animation data to our puppet file. Currently we’re smoothing out the pipeline and developing tools to communicate with different files and systems with metadata nodes. We also provided some Tech support for EVA animation as well as some rigging for a weapon prototype.

VFX

For the past few weeks VFX in Frankfurt has been prototyping the visual looks and styles of some of the Xi’an tech. This tech differs visually from the other races and In order to get this visual look it required us to integrate some new tools into our texture creation workflow.

BHVR

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2016 is off to a great start! We began this month with great excitement for what’s coming next. Here’s what BHVR worked on in January:

Design

January was very successful for the Behaviour Design team. Francois Boucher and Jesse Kalb went full steam ahead on the blueprints and the whiteboxes of Hurston shops. Working with our friends at ATX, we quickly iterated on Hurston locations and are about ready to hand most of the whiteboxes to the Art team.

We also updated our shopping prototype and put it in situation in both Casaba Outlet and in Nyx/Levski bazaar market, proving the concept even more, highlighting our future needs but also its current flaws.

Lead Designer Guillaume Bourque is working with a bunch of team members, both in Montreal and in other studios, setting the next collection of flair items on the right track. All I can say is it’s going to be real nice. We are also looking forward the next location we are going to work on, possibly a space station.

Lastly, we are helping setting up the Bar Citizen Montreal event which is going to take place early February here in Montreal.

Art

This month, well rested from our holydays, we began R&D for a brand new planet. The work consisted mostly on creating a distinct feel and ambience to make sure that all our planets don’t look alike. Furthermore, working on a new planet is a great opportunity to apply the latest techniques that we’ve learned from the previous planets. Hopefully with this in mind, we can improve even more the visual quality of our new assets.

On the building sets, we moved to the polishing phase of the industrial/mining set. Also, we continued work on the different shops that we will be able to explore in Levski.

There was also a lot of work done on industrial props and on the next month flair objects.

Engineering

This new year, there was a lot of work done on different game features. Simon Jambu worked on the Party System, to help you pick up the right instance to play with all your friends.

John Corbett, has been continuously at work on the datastore system, to allow temporary modifications on ships. This will be handled through a holotable on Port Olisar

Martin Poirier is working with other studios on in ships’ display screen optimization: reducing the memory and CPU footprints of ship UI (especially multicrew ships) as well as making the system ship component driven.

Adamo Maiorano and Fabien Poupineau are going full speed ahead on shopping experience. Going through different prototypes to make sure you have the best experience.

Turbulent

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Greetings from Montreal! Here’s what we’ve been up to in the last month:

Organization Invitations

Last month, we launched the new Organization invitation template. We refreshed the look-and-feel so that it gives more prominence to the Organization’s own branding, and also added color schemes to match the type of Organization. You can find this feature under My Account > Organizations, in the left menu.

Subscription campaign

We wrapped up the QA phase for the upcoming Subscription campaign and will be launching in the beginning of February. Subscribers are a key part of the Star Citizen community, as they support the production of “10 for the Chairman,” “Around the ‘Verse,” “Bugsmashers,” “Meet the Devs,” and more. In addition to re-designing the Subscription section of the website, we produced some logos and animations that can be used in videos. We’ve also added new exclusive rewards (for Centurions and Imperators) in an easy-to-read matrix. If you haven’t already done so, now’s the best time to become a Subscriber!

Ship Happens

This was an exciting month for ship production, as three ships were brought into the game. With the release of 2.1, the Sabre became hangar-ready, giving players their first in-game look at this agile fighter. As for flight-ready ships released in 2.1, we had the Freelancer base as well as the Vanguard Warden. During the release of 2.1, a sale was launched alongside it featuring the Sabre, Warden and an Aegis Fighter Pack featuring both the Sabre and its big brother, the Vanguard Warden. The following week also saw the sale of the alien ship, Xi’An Khartu Al, to coincide with Gillian Anderson’s interview on Squadron 42. To close out the month, there was a Free-fly to coincide with the weekend of PAX South.

Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)

We have begun development on the core mechanism for multi-factor authentication, which will greatly reduce the number of hacked accounts. In addition, we’re updating our design layouts to match the current look-and-feel of the website. Once MFA is in place, you will need a second authentication factor besides your username and password in order to access the game. You will decide how you receive this second factor (by email, SMS or a third-party app such as Google Authenticator). We are still in the early stages, so keep checking back for more updates!

ARK Starmap

We began discussions with the Star Citizen dev team to decide on the best way to integrate the Starmap into the game. A lot of factors have to be considered, such as visual integrity, performance, code maintenance, star system updates (synching), and what technologies should be used for the in-game version. Each month, we will provide more details on the process. In the meantime, you can check out our web version at: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/starmap

Behind the Scenes

What happens when the game crashes? Well, we have been working with the Star Citizen dev team to build something we call the Panic Service. The Panic Service is responsible for receiving game client crash data and cataloging them in a centralized database where they can be accessed by the devs. Game crash data is sent to us via the “Receiver”, which is then processed by the “Worker” and stored in a database. From now on, Star Citizen devs will be able to access all crash data from this database, making it easier to extract the pertinent information. This will save time in troubleshooting.

Bar Citizen

For those of you who live in or near Montreal, we hope to meet you at Bar Citizen Montreal! All the details can be found on their Facebook page.

[/article]

Community

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The start of 2016 has been a fantastic one. Right out of the gate, the response from you guys to Star Citizen Alpha 2.0 and 2.1 has been tremendous, and it always makes our jobs just a little more enjoyable when we see all of you enjoying your Star Citizen experience.

Videos

The 10 For series that airs every Monday made another evolution when we started incorporating hosts from different disciplines. With the addition of 10 for the Developers, we can answer questions provided by our development subscribers with more than one perspective. This has been providing us with what we feel are answers that are both more informative, and hopefully more interesting as well.

Around the Verse continues expanding to include coverage of other studios like Austin and Manchester, while addressing the production challenges inherent in trying to coordinate, produce, and direct segments through Skype and email. We’re hopeful to have a chance to visit our European studios in person this year and delve even deeper into the amazing work being done on the other side of the world.

To facilitate the production of these segments, we constructed three free-standing sets to improve overall production value. While only one of them is currently decorated, we have plans to bring the other two online in the coming weeks to months. This in conjunction with upgrades to the audio and lighting equipment, we’re slowly working to make our weekly productions all that we want them to be.

January also saw the release of two videos detailing Gillian Anderson’s work on the upcoming Squadron 42. Gillian is an exciting addition to the cast and we look forward to sharing more behind the scenes looks with other members of the cast in the future.

Forums

We recently added the Shipyard sub-section of the forums: an area dedicated specifically to the discussion of your favorite ships in Star Citizen. This change, like any change, often takes time to get used to, but the developers have taken to the dedicated nature of the feedback they’re looking for, and information is flowing from Citizens to Designers more easily than ever, so we definitely feel this is a huge win for everyone involved.

Live Events

While we didn’t have an official presence at any conventions this month, we were able to send a single infiltrator to PAX South to meet with fans and shake his head at the litany of “when” questions that assaulted him. Our intrepid Community Manager even managed to unexpectedly find himself on a panel with the Community Manager for Elite: Dangerous, much to the delight of fans in attendance.

Perks

We launched our new Subscriptions landing page this month that you can find here. It’s a brief look at all the things becoming a development subscriber gets you. This month’s Subscriber flair was the AV8 Battle Armor Replica from the Puglisi Collection, and looking at the numbers appears to be a big hit with you guys. We’re constantly looking for ways to improve our Subscriber flair, so if you have a fantastic idea, please share it with us in the Subscriber forums.

Coda

We’ll keep it short and sweet this month, as by the time you’ve gotten to this section your eyeballs may be ready to burst. As always, we want to thank the other studios and departments for taking the time to gather all this info for us, as we appreciate it just as much as I’m certain you all do.

See you in the ‘Verse!

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Quelle: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/tran…y-Studio-Report

Zitat von Star Citizen

Free Fly – Try Star Citizen Today!

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Greetings Citizens,

On the fence about Star Citizen? Why not give it a try and see what we’re building! For the next week, we’re enable Free Fly access to all accounts… which means that anyone can jump in to Star Citizen Alpha 2.1.2 today! The Free Fly event gives everyone access to three unique parts of the Star Citizen experience:

• Star Citizen Alpha 2.1.2 – Also known as Crusader or the “mini-PU,” this is the nucleus of the world we’re building! Featuring multiple space stations and environments, scripted missions, places to explore and more, Alpha 2.1.2 is your first look at a much larger universe!
• Arena Commander – Arena Commander is a ‘game within a game’ that we’ve used to develop our flight mechanics and ship combat balance. Take on human opponents or an AI swarm in single seat fighter.
• Social Module – Interact with other players while you explore our first landing zone, ArcCorp! The Social Module is intended as a starting point for our world building,

You can register for an account here to get started. If you already have an account from a previous Free Fly, you’re all set! Just log in via the Star Citizen launcher. This is the first Free Fly that includes Crusader, so there’s more to explore than ever before. Free Fly accounts will have access to the Hornet F7C military fighter, the Aurora LN starter and the Mustang Delta interceptor.

Star Citizen Alpha 2.1.2 Patch Released

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We’ve issued a minor patch for Star Citizen Alpha 2.1 today, focusing on a set of specific bug fixes identified during testing. Thank you as always to our talented backers who have helped us drill down on and now eliminate these bugs! You can find a complete list of changes here.

Package Split Inbound

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At the December livestream, we announced that Squadron 42 and Star Citizen will be split into two separate packages in the near future. To update on this: the split will occur on February 14th. Squadron 42 will be available as either a stand alone game or an optional addon for Star Citizen rather than be included by default. If you want to lock in both games for the lowest possible price, consider pledging before this deadline. You can learn more about Squadron 42, our thrilling single-player adventure, here.

Store Credit Tokens Distributed

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Tokens allowing backers to use store credit to unmelt a single ship have been distributed to every paid account. Please note that these are single-use tokens that can be applied to only one “unmelt.” Additional tokens will be attributed once every quarter (three months) to allow additional unmelts in the future. Tokens do not stack, however, so be sure you use this one before the next distribution! You can access the buy-back page (while logged in) here.

Please note: Customer Service is not able to manually unmelt any additional ships. Please do not submit tickets with this request, as the team will be unable to assist you.

Xi'An Scout Sale Ending

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Want a Xi’an Scout? The final concept sale ends on Monday, February 1st! You can learn more about the Scout, which will be one of the next ships added to Crusader, here().

Remember: we are offering these pledge ships to help fund Star Citizen’s development. The goal is to make additional ships available that give players a different experience rather than a particular advantage when the persistent universe launches. Ship types sold during limited sales will be available to earn in the finished game.

Star Citizen on Social Media

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Want to follow Star Citizen’s development without checking the Comm-Link every day? You can access our official social media challenges here:

Facebook

Cloud Imperium Games Facebook

Twitter

YouTube

Instagram

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Quelle: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/tran…d-Other-Updates

Zitat von Star Citizen

Portfolio: The ARK

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Dismantling the Dark Age

The dawn of the 29th century saw Humanity struggling to redefine itself. For over two hundred years, the dynastic and despotic Messer family ruled the UEE and its people with a callous authority. The pro-Messer propaganda machine crushed dissenting voices and opinions, keeping legitimate facts that might hurt the regime from coming to light.

This information dark age was brought to an end when the Messer regime finally fell in 2792. Erin Toi ascended to Imperator and immediately worked with the Senate to restore faith in the UEE government. The Tribunal system was quickly reinstated to provide a check on the Imperator’s power. The terrible terraforming policies that sparked the successful uprising against Messer were abandoned. And in 2795, the Fair Chance Act was officially adopted to protect the habitat of developing species. These and many other actions were slowly rebuilding a degree of trust between the UEE government and its people. However, mending relations between the UEE and starfaring alien species, who the Messers often vilified for political gain, would prove to be even more difficult.

In 2793, Imperator Toi met with a young, ambitious Senator named Marshall Leon and asked him to help repair Humanity’s interspecies relationships by accepting the position of Diplomatic Secretary. Imperator Toi believed a first-term Senator who never had to navigate Messer-infected political waters would be seen as an envoy of Humanity’s future, not its past.

Knowing the enormity and complexity of the task at hand, Secretary Leon immediately scheduled meetings with Xi’An and Banu diplomats. He acknowledged that the repair of relationships would take time, delicacy and — most importantly — trust, but also knew that his words and promises, or even those of the Imperator, would not be enough to mend the damage done. Only a bold act of diplomacy and peace could convince the entire universe that Humanity had truly changed its ways.

It was with that grand goal in mind that Secretary Leon conceived of the Ark.

The Dream

Secretary Marshall Leon named his project the Ark, after an ancient story about a seafaring ship that saved both Humans and the animals of Earth from a massive flood. As Secretary Leon remarked during his initial speech before the Senate, in early 2794, “Much like its namesake, this Ark will be a manifestation of one of Humanity’s greatest strengths — empathy. A trait that has sadly not been seen from our government in far too long.”

A bill was put forth that requested funds to construct an orbital platform with the dream that it would not be bound to any one location, species or government. It would travel between the systems of all species to promote and share universal knowledge while also providing a neutral, safe space for diplomatic discussions. Secretary Leon was convinced the future of the UEE depended on two things: access to information and stable relationships with other species. As Secretary Leon often said during debates over funding the Ark, “Humanity is better off with friends instead of enemies.”

The combination of Secretary Leon’s stirring arguments, the endorsement of Imperator Toi, and the desire to distance the UEE from its recent past led to the Senate’s overwhelming approval of the Ark. Construction was slated to start in late 2794 once a suitable location was chosen. A myriad of Senators, interested in the accompanying economic bump, campaigned to have it built in their system, but Secretary Leon wanted to keep the Ark apolitical. So, in a surprise move, he chose to have it built in Tayac; a system with no native population or representation in the Senate. A system long deemed off-limits to the public during the Messer era.

A system, like the UEE, looking to redefine itself.

The Reality

Construction on the Ark started in 2795 and progressed more slowly than anticipated. The plan was to cannibalize an abandoned platform above Tayac that the military had used for the recently declassified Project Vespa, a secret attempt by the Messer regime to weaponize the terraforming process. Secretary Leon hoped it would signify that the UEE was dismantling its warmongering ways in favor of peace. Disassembling the weaponized components proved to be more expensive and time-sensitive than expected, incurring major delays for the project.

As the initial budget ballooned, Senators who had previously supported the project started to question it. Mainly, they questioned the section of the bill that created a foundation, independent of any government, to oversee the Ark’s operation. Senators suddenly wondered why the UEE was paying for a project over which they would not have jurisdiction, and even briefly blocked funding as a way to regain control over the Ark. It was only after Imperator Toi brought her political might to bear that the project got back online.

While construction progressed over the following years, Secretary Leon frequently visited with Banu and Xi’An representatives to discuss the Ark. He passionately argued that its future belonged to all of them. It was during these discussions that Secretary Leon learned his vision was not being embraced by others species as he hoped. Although enthusiastic participants, the Banu had little to no historical records to share. Meanwhile, the Xi’An had serious concerns that the platform might still be weaponized and outright refused to allow the Ark into their territory.

Disappointed but not deterred, Leon decided to lead by example, so he pushed for as much Human knowledge as possible to be made available at the Ark. Human companies were encouraged and incentivized to contribute any information that would not hurt business. Meanwhile, the government released a trove of information. While classified government documents, military files and personal correspondences were considered off-limits, almost everything else was considered for admission. Critics complained that enemies could use this information against us. To which Secretary Leon responded, “If anything, it will be our actions, not our openness, that cause the next conflict.”

In 2800, Secretary Leon won a contentious election to become the next Imperator. Encouraged to run and endorsed by Erin Toi, Secretary Leon highlighted his work on the Ark during his campaign, claiming it proved he was a consensus builder who could also repair Humanity’s relationship with other species.

Shortly after his inauguration, construction on the Ark was completed. Imperator Leon invited representatives from the Xi’An, Banu, Tevarin and even the Vanduul to attend the gala celebration. During his introductory speech, Imperator Leon appealed for everyone to help the Ark succeed in spreading peace and knowledge. “I am proud to open these doors and beg all of you to fill it with the vast and colorful history that each and every species has to offer. Let this Ark stand as a testament and proud record of the lives that we and those before us have all lived.”

The Present

Today, the Ark still orbits in the Tayac System. Months after opening its doors, the foundation running it realized the cost of hauling it from system to system exceeded the expected revenue from donors and fundraising. Though Tayac I provides the perfect neutral ground to permanently station the platform, a lack of other interesting objects in the system does not help its visitation numbers.

While the Ark has failed to become the bastion of interspecies diplomacy that was originally intended, Imperator Leon would still be proud of its current operations. It is the authoritative repository of information in the known universe.

To this day, it collects and analyzes an awesome amount of information sent from explorers, researchers, scientists and everyday people for possible inclusion in the Galactapedia. The Ark also works hand-in-hand with a variety of prominent universities and research institutions to verify information, and even funds projects to help expand on what is already known. Among archivists and researchers, there is no job more coveted than a position curating a portion of the deluge of data submitted to the Ark.

The crown jewel of the Ark’s operations is the Starmap. This essential resource of interstellar navigation is the de facto authority on what can be found in the midst of the great, black expanse. It provides an object’s location, historical context, and data on a variety of useful related topics. Constantly updated thanks to the contributions of hardworking stellar cartographers and explorers, the map reflects the ever-expanding boundary of our universe and our understanding of it.

Even though the Ark may have not yet lived up to all of Imperator Leon’s expectations, it is still an astounding achievement. Its dedication to truth and commitment to collecting knowledge from as many sources as possible provides an important, all-encompassing view of the universe. In many ways the Ark could be considered one of Humanity’s most vital creations: an invaluable institution designed to preserve Humanity’s future by keeping us mindful of its past.

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Quelle: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/tran…rtfolio-The-ARK

Zitat von Star Citizen

10 for the Chairman Episode 75

The Chairman answers 10 questions from our development subscribers.

02:15 – 2-Step Verification Login
02:53 – Ship connected to User Online/Offline Status
03:56 – Game Stability Updates
05:29 – Picking Up Objects On Planets
06:56 – Griefing
11:57 – Multi-Monitor HUD
14:47 – Large Ship Damage Control Lockers
17:43 – Patches Before Next Milestone
18:30 – Star Marine’s Future
21:15 – Dogfights Through Space Stations

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Quelle: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/tran…or-The-Chairman

Zitat von Star Citizen

Star Citizen Alpha 2.1.1 Available!

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Greetings Citizens,

We have pushed the Star Citizen Alpha 2.1.1 patch to the live servers! Alpha 2.1.1 makes a number of balance updates and bug fixes to the 2.1 release launched last week. Thank you to our dedicated PTU players for helping us test and develop this patch; it should make for a better Star Citizen experience for everyone! You can download Alpha 2.1.1 via the Star Citizen launcher, and you can find a full list of bug fixes and changes in the Alpha 2.1.1 patch notes here.

Bug Reporting

Remember, while there’s a lot to explore in Alpha 2.1.1 the game still just a portion of the Star Citizen experience! You can help the team improve future releases by reporting bugs and other issues using the Star Citizen Issue Council. The amazing feedback from STar Citizen backers is what has allowed us to interate on the PTU so quickly, and we’re eager for feedback about the Live release as well. You can access the Issue Council here.

Quelle: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/tran…a-211-Available

Zitat von Star Citizen

Squadron 42: Behind the Scenes - Gillian Anderson

Greetings Citizens,

We’re excited to introduce you to another member of the Squadron 42 cast: Gillian Anderson! Check out the embedded video for an interview and footage from the performance capture work she’s done for Squadron 42. We couldn’t be happier with her performance, and we can’t wait for you to meet the character she brought to life!

[/aticle]

The Xi'An Scout

[article]

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The truth is out there! In honor of Gillian Anderson’s return as Agent Scully on The X-Files this weekend, we’re bringing back the most thematically appropriate Star Citizen concept ship: the mysterious Xi’An Khartu-al scout! This complex alien ship will be available in the pledge store for the next week.

The Khartu is the light attack craft of the Xi’An military. Contrary to Human ship design, the Khartu doesn’t have a traditional main thruster, instead featuring an array of maneuvering thrusters on articulated rigs. This design allows for incredible agility, making them the bane of UEE pilots, who bestowed the nickname ‘Quark’ because when all of the thrusters are firing, the ship looks like a spark flying through space. The Xi’an Aopoa corporation also manufactures an export model, the Khartu-al, for sale to human civilians as a dedicated scout/explorer. The export model features the same Xi’an maneuvering rig, but control surfaces modified for human use and a more limited armament.

The Scout is still a concept ship, meaning that it will not appear in your Hangar today… but we are happy to announce that it is currently in active development and will be one of the next ships added to Star Citizen’s Alpha in a 2.x patch! You can check out the latest WIP graybox images in this post to see how development is progressing.

Remember: we are offering these pledge ships to help fund Star Citizen’s development. The goal is to make additional ships available that give players a different experience rather than a particular advantage when the persistent universe launches. Ship types sold during limited sales will be available to earn in the finished game.

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Quelle: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/tran…-The-XiAn-Scout

Zitat von Star Citizen

10 for the Developers Episode 02

CG Supervisor Forest Stephan and Senior Producer Eric Kieron Davis answer 10 questions from our development subscribers.

00:45 – Alien Ship Concept
04:26 – Ship Pipeline Improvements
09:23 – Aquila, Phoenix, and Taurus Remodel
12:34 – Implementing the New Damage Tech
15:15 – Creating Characters
20:55 – Pipeline for Minor NPCs
22:58 – Clothing Style Guides
25:44 – Character Customization
27:49 – Retaliator Commercial
30:11 – Non-Human Character Updates

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Quelle: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/tran…-The-Developers

Zitat von Star Citizen

Star Citizen Alpha 2.1 Available!

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Greetings Citizens,

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We are excited to announce that Star Citizen Alpha 2.1.0 is now available on the Live server for all players via the Star Citizen launcher. Alpha 2.1 features an array of bug fixes and balance updates aimed at enhancing the Star Citizen experience. Thanks to expert testing from backers on the PTU, we’ve been able to significantly improve the experience and stability of Star Citizen from the December 2.0 release. We’d like to thank everyone in the community who contributed their time and effort to making this patch happen!

In addition to these fixes, Alpha 2.1 features two new flyable ships in Crusader: the MISC Freelancer and the Aegis Vanguard Warden. (Surprise!) The Aegis Sabre is now hangar ready, for those eager to explore their brand new space superiority fighters! There’s more to discover in Crusader as well, including a new type of mission surrounding the Covalex Shipping hub. You can find a complete list of updates, fixes, balance changes and more in the full patch notes
.

New Ships from Aegis

Missed out on your chance to pick up a Vanguard or a Sabre? We’re making both ships available for the next week for anyone interested in picking one up for Alpha 2.1! The Vanguard is now flight ready, and the Sabre will appear in the Hangar. For anyone interested in the full squadron, we’ve created a limited edition pack that includes both ships with a small discount.

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Remember: we are offering these pledge ships to help fund Star Citizen’s development. The goal is to make additional ships available that give players a different experience rather than a particular advantage when the persistent universe launches. Ship types sold during limited sales will be available to earn in the finished game.

Weapon Update

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We’ve also added a new weapon to the game, the Apocalypse Arms REVENANT ballistic Gatling gun. This size 4 weapon can be mounted on the Vanguard, Constellation and (with an adaptive mount) the Cutlass and Hornet. You can learn more in the Voyager Direct storefront here.

Bug Reporting

Remember, while there’s a lot to explore in Alpha 2.1 the game still just a portion of the Star Citizen experience! You can help the team improve future releases by reporting bugs and other issues using the Star Citizen Issue Council. The amazing feedback from STar Citizen backers is what has allowed us to interate on the PTU so quickly, and we’re eager for feedback about the Live release as well. You can access the Issue Council here.

Alles anzeigen

Quelle: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/tran…ha-21-Available

Zitat von Star Citizen

Monthly Studio Report December

Greetings Citizens,

2015 was quite a year for Star Citizen! Since the launch of Alpha 2.0, the team has been glued to their monitors watching backers stream and play and adventure in the first corner of the universe we’re building. There’s plenty of work still to be done, but we’re thrilled to have a version of the game available for play that (we believe) shows the project’s true potential. We hope you’re enjoying 2.0 (or 2.1, if you’re a fan of the PTU!)… there’s plenty more to see in the coming days! But before we look ahead, we’d like to look back at what everyone accomplished in December. Cloud Imperium Games closed for the holidays, allowing our developers some much needed rest and family time… but that doesn’t mean we didn’t make a lot of progress. Read on for our December monthly report to find out just what everyone was up to…

CIG Los Angeles

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Happy New Year everyone! We hope you had a great month because we are really excited by what we got finished before the calendar turned over to 2016. We tackled some huge milestones such as the new ItemSystem, Loadout Editor, Character Clothing and more. Dig in to the information below to read about even more accomplishments from the LA studio.

Engineering

On the Engineering side, our primary objective was to provide as much stability to the 2.0 release as possible. As new builds of the PTU were released over the course of December, the stability in each iteration drastically improved. Stability will always be one of our top objectives as providing a reliable and exciting experience is a prime directive.

Lead Engineer Paul Reindell and Engineer Mark Abent have been aggressively working on what we’re calling “ItemSystem 2.0”. This system will allow greater control over the itemization on the back end. The first iteration has been integrated into our development code and we are starting to see the preliminary benefits of this new system that’s really exciting our developers.

Associate Engineer Chad Zamzow was responsible for implementing the various disabled states for targets struck by the EMP weapon currently employed on the Avenger Warlock. Further refinements will include flickering lights and possibly arcs of electricity across the control panels of the ship. So keep an eye out for the tiny details this new weapon effect will be adding to the game.

Ariel Xu created a new tool we are calling the “Loadout Editor”. This tool is designed to create a visualization of our entities. This will allow the designers to visually edit the loadouts of the Vehicles, Items, and Character rather than manually editing the XML file, which is even better and more intuitive for design and balancing than just having a menu or chart-based editor. Now that the Loadout Editor is completed, Ariel has started working on another tool called the “Port Editor,” a tool which allows designers to dynamically Add/Delete/Edit the contents of the port.

Flight engineer John Pritchett has been working on fine-tuning the EVA system to make it much more reliable and canny during flight. But most impressively, John was also the individual who helped create our planetary landing flight mode that viewers saw on our December 2015 livestream.

Design

Another very successful year has come and gone for the LA Tech Design team. Starting with new leadership, Kirk Tome took the reins of the team by accepting the role of Tech Design Lead. We have great expectations to come from this team in 2016 and the team could not be in better hands with this tenured industry veteran at the proverbial helm.

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During the development of the 2.0 patch, we reached several milestones that will drastically impact future development and provide exciting new content to our backers, players, and fans. We completed the white-box design of two ships; the Xi’an Scout and the MISC Reliant. The Xi’an Scout white box was completed by Tech Design Lead Kirk Tome, while the Reliant white box was completed by our item guru, Matt Sherman. Furthermore, as an added bonus, Calix Reneau also completed the grey box tech design of the MISC Reliant, bringing it that much closer to being hangar-ready.

Of course, balance is always a paramount for gaming and thus Calix and Matt have both spent a tremendous amount of time gathering input from the forums, chat rooms, and emails. The Freelancer is new to our flyable ship lineup, and a first round of weapon and ship health balance was achieved for its gaming debut. Expect more balance passes in the future as the flyable ship lineup fills out and go up against each other! Every release brings new insights and as more gameplay and customizations become possible, your testing data helps us home in on an inherently moving target.

On the feature development-side, 2.0 saw the release of the EMP system designed to temporarily disable your opponent. Further development and evolution of the EMP system was addressed using feedback from the release, such as improvements on how the system will affect the HUD, and various ship systems. Also, Randy Vazquez has completed a first pass on a gameplay design for the Salvage mechanic.

While December was a short month due to the holidays, we have laid the groundwork for a tremendous amount of progress.
h2. Art

We rocked it hard on the art side in LA during the month of December in 2015. We’ve been working tenaciously to build closer towards some anxiously anticipated releases, such as clothes shopping in the PU, and Squadron 42.

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On the character side we’ve been working on making “Old Man” Colton as great as he can be. You’ll be seeing him in Squadron 42! We’ve also been feverishly prepping some intimidating marines for some exciting action. We can wait for you to meet them! We also can’t wait for you to dig on the variety of stylish threads that we’ve been preparing for your character with our friends at CGBot, available soon (we hope!) for purchase in a PU near you!

While all this amazing character progress has been moving forward, we haven’t been neglecting our ships. We’re very much stoked for when we will be able to roll out the Reliant to the hangar. It’s with special pride that we imagine our supporters easing back into the pilot seat for the first time. (There are two seats, side by side. Can you guess which one it is?) We hope you’re as pumped about the Reliant as we are!

And that’s December! We had another great month of finished tasks that is leading to an incredible experience in both Star Citizen and Squadron 42. We’re looking forward to your feedback and can’t wait to get more done. We’re inspired by you and work as hard as we can to make our milestones a part of history. See you next month!

CIG Austin

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Howdy Citizens,

December brought our year to a close in grand fashion! We had a great run of builds, fixes, and PTU testing leading up to the launch of 2.0.0 in December! And right after that we jumped into 2.1.0 testing for a fast follow up on PTU. Many people in the studio worked very hard in December to bring this content to the live server, and we have a lot to share. Thankfully we also got some time to relax and recharge a bit after the Christmas holiday and now the team is back hard at work on making the best damn space sim ever!

Persistent Universe Team

Howdy folks! Hope everyone had a fantastic holiday season. Everyone on the PU team here in Austin got a much needed break, but not before knocking some last minute tasks off our plate and finishing the year strong.

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To start, congratulations are in order to Chris Smith and Josh Coons, who finished up the much-awaited revamp to the Constellation Andromeda. This ship is gorgeous, and we love seeing you guys flying it around now out in the ‘verse. Chris and Josh have since moved on to the Xi’an Scout, and aim to finish that up later this month.

The other artists here have been trucking along on building and detailing the Levski landing zone in Nyx, supporting BHVR in providing lighting, VFX, and technical oversight. Mark Skelton continues to provide his fearless leadership and direction in helping to make this environment look as amazing as possible. In the Pupil to Planet video, we showed off a bit of how Delamar might look as you depart the Levski landing zone. Hats off to the team in Frankfurt for getting this tech up and running so quickly, but it does create an interesting challenge for Art. Before now, all we have really had to worry about is how the landing zone looks from the ground at a single time of day. Now we’re having to think about not just what a landing zone looks like from eye-level, but how it looks from orbit! Mark has his work cut out for him making sure that these landing zones look amazing not just from varying heights but varying times of day as well, in varying degrees of light, shadow, and everything in between. Eventually our planets will rotate just like real planets, and with that comes a full day/night cycle that we have to bear in mind when designing and art directing. It certainly is a challenge but we are looking forward to it.

Speaking of Pupil to Planet, before the break designer Pete “Weather Wizard“ Mackay spent some time using his weather wizardry to nail down elements of cruise speed. While we were doing seamless fly-throughs from orbit down to the landing zone we noticed that the speed at which the ship approached was a bit off. We wanted this approach speed to feel fast but without feeling ludicrous. Pete spent some time making calculations to determine the best approach velocity to get the feel just right. He’s still tweaking the parameters to get it perfect, but should have it nailed down soon.

Recently our Design Team has been focusing on additional landing zones in the PU, specifically focusing on breaking up all of our landing zones into Hero, Small Sandbox, and Space Station categories. Every landing zone is extremely detailed, and with that comes a lot of time and resource required to get them to the level of quality that we’re shooting for. Because of this, we are shifting gears slightly and shuffling our schedule around to get MORE landing zones ready in a shorter amount of time, which means everyone not only has to be efficient, but also be clever at the same time. We’re still focusing on hero locations like Hurston and Crusader, but we’re also prioritizing smaller landing zones like Sherman and Odyssa and space stations like mining outposts and research stations. Each of these locations will have their own points of interest and shops, and this requires a lot of design attention by the likes of Rob Reininger and Evan Manning.

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Our Animation Team continues to convert and integrate the raw animation data we captured last year for the PU. The Medical Unit animations are nearly complete, and the Nightclub animations are not far behind. Throughout this process we’ve identified and solved issues with female locomotion and vending machine metrics. Our Ship Animators helped prep the Sabre to be Hangar-Ready and get the Freelancer flying. Our next focus will be R&D on what we’re calling the Personality Overlay System. Lead Animator Bryan Brewer will partner with a programmer to blend animations together depending on an NPC’s personality as set by Design. This system would also allow users to select the idle animation that fits them best from a Character Customization UI to create variety amongst player animation. We’re excited about this system because this will enable us to use the hundreds of animations for PU and Players in a better, more adjustable way.

On the Networking side, Jason Ely and Tom Sawyer spent much of their time before the break prepping the Party System for 2.0.0. release. There is still lots of work to be done and these improvements will continue to be a focus into the new year, so if you think it’s still a little rough, please hang in there – we’ll be shoring it up. We know it’s a natural feature desire for multicrew play, and it has to start somewhere! Meanwhile, for those who own a Million Mile High Club, we also spent some time getting access and invites set up for that environment as well. We also made some headway on Persistence with the help of Jeff Zhu. This new year will see renewed focus on this critical feature, with new resources being recruited to help knock this functionality out once and for all. Soon we will see the first iteration of truly persistent data in the hands of the players with the release of Shopping v1.

Live Operations

QA

For the month of December, QA mostly focused on testing SC Alpha 2.0.0 and SC Alpha 2.1.0. After 14 deployments (!) to the Public Test Universe (PTU) in a very short period of time, we were extremely excited to finally release SC Alpha 2.0.0 to the live environment. Our thanks to the PTU testers who provided their enthusiasm, attention to detail, and real-time cooperation with us in order to get 2.0 out of the PTU and live into everyone’s hands!

That would have been a good place to start a vacation, but we didn’t stop there. We immediately jumped into testing SC Alpha 2.1.0, again with the help of our loyal and valued PTU testers. We had guarded hopes to release 2.1.0 to our live environment before the holiday break, but after 4 deployments to the PTU, we were unfortunately still experiencing some stability issues with the additional content. The decision was made to keep 2.1.0 on the PTU over the holidays but open it up to everyone to check out the new flyable Freelancer.

Over the course of the month we deployed fourteen 2.0.0 builds to the PTU, one deployment of 2.0.0 to live and four 2.1.0 deployments to the PTU. Supporting these deployments was a significant undertaking. For each deployment, the team would test each aspect of the game and raise any potential serious issues to production. The team also would conduct launcher/patch testing as well as compile patch notes. Following the deployment, the team would monitor the community feedback.

After each deployment, Jeffrey Pease would gather stability metrics on server and client crashes and provide a comprehensive report to CIG Leadership. Jeffrey Pease has done an amazing job in his various roles in QA and I am happy to announce he has officially transitioned into a development role as a LiveOps Technician. Congratulations to Bearded-CIG!

There have also been other movements within our ranks. Tyler Witkin, who you may know as Zyloh-CIG, has been promoted to the level of Senior QA. Tyler will be taking a more active leadership role on the team in his new position. In addition to his normal QA duties, Tyler has also been doing a great job keeping the community in the loop with regular updates on Discord and various social media outlets. Tyler has also obtained additional screenshots and videos requested by Marketing that were used in various updates on the RSI website.

In testing 2.0.0 and 2.1.0 the team has been working very closely with engineers Clive Johnson, George Kidd, Paul Reindell and other developers on extensive performance testing including AI spawning, Server bottle-necking, and server or client crashes. Melissa Estrada has continued with Automation development as well as working closely with engineer Francesco Roccucci on in depth testing of AI behavior.
Todd Raffray and Robert Gaither have ensured that contacts, the party system, Million Mile High Club and ArcCorp continued to be properly tested. Andrew Rexroth continued to test all FPS functionality sending a report each day highlighting any new or particularly serious issues.

Our Information Specialist Marissa Meissner has been ensuring that for each deployment, all fixes are verified and included in the patch notes. Marissa has been working very closely with Will Leverett in Game Support on messaging and accuracy of promotional mail outs and PTU invites as well as helping to update several FAQ’s to assist Customer Service. Marissa is also working with our Marketing Manager Vincent Gallopain to ensure marketing materials are accurate. Marissa has also been updating our internal knowledge base with a new workflow for reporting performance issues as well as routine updates of deprecated components and production ownership of certain ship manufacturers.

In addition to testing, QA has also taken on the task of providing feedback to CIG Leadership on various aspects of the game. Andrew Hesse has provided very detailed reports on ship behavior which have been very useful to our designers in their attempts to balance ship flight and combat.

During January QA will be continuing to test 2.1.0 for its inevitable deployment to the live environment and promptly begin testing 2.2.0. It is turning out to already be a very active new year. See you in the verse!

Game Support

Our (amazing) December was all about 2.0 and 2.1!

It’d be easy to overlook how well 2.0 went through the dev pipeline to Live, because from a process perspective it went so smoothly! Normally, such a major release takes several months to get from initial build to Live, but we did it all within a handful of weeks, in large part due to Game Support (and other teams) working alongside the community who did excellent work in helping us identify major bugs and game imbalances, which we triaged through Issue Council and got into the dev pipeline quickly. It was truly a quantum leap in terms of turnaround time and update speed, and this demonstrates the value of all the time that DevOps and Production spent last year re-engineering the development, build, and patching pipelines. Sometimes, to an outsider those long periods spent building development infrastructure may make it feel like progress on the game is slow, but once the benefits start to kick in, it really pays off, and we think the rapid patch cycle that brought 2.0 to you in December proves it!

On the topic of PTU, we understand that there was confusion on how PTU testers were selected for closed testing campaigns. Creating any level of confusion or frustration is obviously not our goal, and we FULLY realize how much players want in on early rounds of testing. That said, the PTU is not about privilege or early access – the mission of the PTU is to iron out a release to a quality sufficient for deployment to live, the faster the better. Ideally, a PTU tester is not someone who wants to be “first in line” for new content, but a true and dedicated backer who is willing to put in effort alongside QA, Game Support, and the various Operations teams to get that new content out to the rest of the community and reduce the amount of time it’s necessarily held back for troubleshooting.

So, while we’d like to stress that it’s not “early access to content” but rather instead actual testing, and this motivation continues to drive our ongoing revamps and reevaluations of the PTU access selection process.

• Issue Council Participation
• PTU Participation
  

We’ve graded players based on these two criteria, and should we have the need for a closed testing period, we’ll be inviting our players who have helped out the most in these areas on a scaled basis. Some PTU releases are open to everyone, but during the very early phases of a major release – particularly if it’s technically tricky – , we’ll consider restricting access until a more reasonable level of stability can be achieved. (Remember that in testing, different problems and bugs can have different root causes, and sometimes smaller, focused testing is what’s needed and sometimes a larger pool of testers for stress testing is needed. Access headcounts can vary from one release candidate to the next depending on what kind of testing is most useful)

We’re excited about the cool things to come in January, and we’re excited to work with you to get it done. 

IT/Operations

Happy New Year from the IT Team at CIG! The month of December brought us many new challenges and even more successes. Much of what the IT department focuses on at the end of the year is boring software licensing renewals, software and user account audits, and internal system maintenance. This December the team has also been heavily involved in publishing support and for the 2.0 & 2.1 publishes. A portion of the team supported the project by providing network and storage optimizations to further improve the build system performance in order to help deliver more builds per day for internal testing. Moving the builds between studios also falls on IT so these services were pushed to the limits allowing us to find even more areas we could tune for performance. The QA teams pull a lot of builds throughout the day, so many that they can actually begin to stress the network in certain areas so new optimizations were added where needed to help QA get builds down to machines as fast as possible. Finally, the IT Team got to provide additional support for LiveOps publishes by prioritizing their traffic over all other outbound traffic because with the amount of publishes we did, every minute counts.

Live Ops

December may have been the most productive month ever for the LiveOps team. With back to back publishes happening nearly every day of the month, it became necessary to dramatically reduce the publish windows. This is the time it takes to deploy the servers, supporting systems, prepare and distribute all patches out to the edge networks. Reducing this time provides faster access to new versions by the backers but just as importantly, allows us to get feedback to the dev team more quickly. At the rate builds were coming out it became clear that we needed to create duplicate environments in order to pre-stage a publish without having to take down the currently running service for 4-6 hours.

Ahmed became the real rock star this month when he built out all the duplicate environments and modified the publishing process. Based on his work, we were able to reduce the publish window completely by simply flipping load balancers from one environment to another. Additionally Ahmed added a number of additional servers in order to accommodate additional logging which was ultimately instrumental to the massive stability improvements we saw in December. Ahmed also had a great time with the publishes during the month as well. We saw chat rooms light up every time he came on line because those backers helping us on the PTU became used to seeing him show up every time we completed another publish.

The LiveOps team also delivered major improvements to internal development, testing, and reporting tools. The build system experienced several improvements to reduce build times including one fix that allowed us to make use of even more processing power than before. The tools used to collect source code for compiling have been undergoing improvements as well with early reports of hours of reduction times under worst case scenarios.

Wrapping up 2015 with such a fantastic month makes looking forward to 2016 that much more exciting.

Foundry 42 UK

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Greetings Citizens,

December may have been a short month, but it wasn’t quiet! We had a lot to do at Foundry 42 UK, with team members from every discipline contributing to the project. Let’s find out what they were up to!

VFX

In December, the VFX team, Mike, Adam, Caleb, and Sean, focused on a flight-ready effects pass for the MISC Freelancer and AEGS Vanguard. A flight-ready pass includes both interior and exterior damage states (including a “deathmask”) thrusters, and weapons/counter measures.

We also continued to polish ambient environment effects for the Alpha 2.0 Crusader map. Mostly this was polish/optimization to tie in with some lighting tweaks. However, we also added new airlock depressurization effects, so there is a clear visual difference between pressurization and depressurization.

Finally, we focused on a “post-2.0 release” data clean-up. For the most part this meant removing and re-organizing our particle libraries and texture folders. Not the sexiest task in the world – quite laborious in fact – but necessary nonetheless as it will help us to hit the ground running in 2016!

Props

As 2015 came to an end the props team, Ben, Dan and our friends at Behaviour Interactive, put the finishing touches on the Casaba shop interior. The store is now complete in terms of prop work and we are just waiting on the stock to come in from our clothing manufacturers! It was an interesting environment to dress, taking on the role of shop fitters and adhering to a brand guidelines to really sell that retail experience.

The gold standard components are 95% there. They just need a final pass on the materials and then our first two will be ready. Work has also begun on the next set this week so we should have four by the end of the month. We are working closely with the tech designers and they are in the process of defining the sub-component list which is the final part of the puzzle from our point of view.

The rest of the team are now focusing on our core low-tech prop set in preparation for all the new environments coming in 2016.

I have been concentrating on getting a solid backlog / tracking of everything we currently have in game, the sheer number of assets is getting impressive and I needed a fast way of being able to track exactly where each asset is up to and also be able to quickly filter and search the assets so that when new requests come in we can prioritize them against what we have already in game. Once complete we should be in a really good place to start pumping out everything we need to bring the environments to life. This is really important from a game performance perspective, because the sheer number of assets, models, animations, and geometry in the game means that if you don’t do this intelligently, bad things can happen to your load times and FPS. It may not sound like exciting work, but when you want to maintain the pace of your gaming experience, it’s as critical as a lot of other things!

Finally we have a new hire here in the UK studio, the props team here is now up to three! We are still looking and have some strong candidates so hopefully will bolster our numbers again soon!

Ships

The ship art team led by Nathan were fighting hard in December to get you some new shiny ships to play with over the festive break, so we hope it was worth it!

Neil, Peter, Robin, Jose, and Jan managed to get the new and revised Freelancer exterior and interior art flight ready our 2.1 PTU release, and Paul and Ian also supported Nathan in completing the final art for the Sabre and the Vanguard (including damage states for the latter).

Many of you will be pleased to know that the Starfarer exterior and interior are well underway with Matt, Colin, Joe, Phil and Jay making good progress so we’ll be looking forward to releasing that to you later this year and also looking forward to releasing many more cool and wonderful Star Citizen spaceships in 2016.

Concepts

Paul and the concept team has been hard at work, the Javelin has had a bit of a nip-and-tuck with some remodeling to bring it into line with the Aegis brand.

Sarah has been valiantly battling her way through the many props needed, working on both high tech and low tech prop design styles, and on solidifying the design language should we need to outsource some of the work later on.

Jort has been working his Christmas magic on various space station interiors, dressing passes and additional concept work to help define what we need to make these areas come alive.

Stu has worked up additional pods for the ARGO RUV which we need for SQ42 and Gary finished up the Xian Scout and has really gone to town helping define further interiors for the Shubin Mining Facility.

Characters

Our two man team has been getting to grips with the new and improved pipeline where work has been done on Squadron 42 character Randall Graves by Jon (which you may have seen in the Livestream), both high and low poly models, along with some work to the Female officers uniform. As a good test for Michal our junior character artist, we set him the task of sculpting a stone statue needed for one of our future levels, and I must say the results were great!

In-Game Animation

Uisdean Ross and the UK animation team are continuing our push on the FPS AI and player mechanics. Player cover animation implementation is on-going by Colin and Dan and being refined and reviewed, this is an ongoing process working closely with the programming team.

The AI cover behaviors are currently going through a first pass by Spencer, and we are providing a base set for the AI programming team which will then be iterated on. Improvements are also being made to the no weapon (unarmed) locomotion set, as well as stops and starts.

Design

The Christmas break over and we are back in action for 2016. We have so much to do this year in the UK we need to make every day count!

The UI Director Zane and Lead Systems designer Karl are working on a simplified HUD UI to level out the learning curve when it comes to interacting with your ships systems. All the advanced bells and whistles will still be there for the more hard core players. They are also working with the engineering UI team to implement a functional EVA HUD for players to get all the information they need while experiencing zero-g movement.

The Live team of Luke, Danny and Matt are listening to your feedback and fixing up issues with the current Live build to make it more stable and fun. They are also looking at further iterations to some of the more basic design implementations that need further work, such as EMP. Syncing up with the ship release schedule in becoming a strong focus for this team going forward to make sure we cover the design functionality that is required for the various ships, such as cargo movers.

The Tech Design team led by John has scaled up over the last few months ands is now big enough to really get moving on the new ships as the Art team hands them over to us. We have also been looking into ways of addressing ship balance in a less reactive, more forward-looking way that is looking promising over the next month or so.

Mike and the Squadron 42 designers are transitioning the levels into the large world system rather than lots of separate CryFiles. We still need to get better at excluding SQ42 files from the current build process as you guys seem to find anything that leaks through and they sometimes appear as spoilers! This will be getting a more robust system in the future and will have the side effect of getting some of these intermediate patch sizes more under control.

All in all, we are geared up for a very busy year on Star Citizen here in the UK and with your continued solid support we know we can make this something very special! Thanks again.

Graphics

Over the last month the graphics director Ali and his team have made various performance improvements to the game.

The lighting shaders have had significant work and are now faster than the base CryEngine shaders despite having more features thanks to Ben. Geoff put in some hard work so that we can now cull rooms that you can’t see on ships and space stations much more accurately thanks to improvements to the culling system. The LOD system has been overhauled by Muhammed which should result in us rendering fewer polygons in the distance where you can’t really see them, and we’ve also made some significant improvements to the performance of our internal tools when generating LODs which could take several minutes on our largest levels and now takes just a few seconds. Okka and the rest of the team also spent a large amount of December bug fixing for the PTU and Live Releases.

Our focus now is on planning our work for 2016, and focusing on the features that Squadron 42 requires. The first features we’re working on will be improved HDR effects such as bloom, lens flares and eye adaption to give a better impression of the stark lighting you get in space and sci-fi scenes in general. We’ll be revamping some shaders such as the glass shader so we can improve the quality of the cockpits and helmets as well as increase their performance. We’ll also be getting back onto our volumetric gas cloud work which had been paused during the work on 2.0 but is crucial for both Squadron 42 and the Persistent Universe.

Environments

Ian and the environment team hope you’re all enjoying playing Crusader, our team is having a great time watching you play!

Jake and part of the team has been doing final bug fixes and lighting improvements for the 2.1 release of Crusader, so it should look and perform better than in 2.0. Eddie and rest of the team has been focusing down on one of our Squadron 42 levels, not too much we can reveal at this stage but it will be our test bed for creating sandbox locations with terrain and multiple landing points.

Engineering

For obvious reasons this has been a shorter month for us here in the UK and people have been taking some well-deserved time off. That’s not to say we’ve been taking it easy whilst we’ve been in though!

The highlight for Derek and the engineering team in December was getting Alpha 2.0 finally out to everybody after a huge effort from anybody concerned. We’re really proud of what we’ve managed to achieve, especially as it has gone down so well with the community. We keep an eye on all the forums and Twitch streams and people do seem to be having a blast which makes all the hard work feel worthwhile. But of course as soon as one milestone has been hit we’re onto the next. We’re now in the final stages of getting Alpha 2.1 hitting the streets so we’re in the general stabilization phase, with many engineers including Rob, Clive, George, and Craig getting those horrid random crash bugs which have crept in fixed and some performance optimizations.

More general ongoing work. One of the big things Jens and the FPS code team have helping working on is the new physicalized EVA which is a big departure from the current implementation. Rather than “faking” the fidelity of the player movement as we have been doing currently we’re going down the route of using a proper physical simulation, in much the same way as we do with the ships. As part of that the character is also put into a ragdoll state which gives the whole movement a much more fluid and natural feel to it. The effects of this should include a slight opposite impulse to you to help make it feel like you’re firing a real weapon.

It does bring up a whole host of new problems to solve, many of which are nasty edge cases. For example, as you EVA around and then hit a gravity area you need to come out of rag doll and transition into the normal locomotion again with it feeling natural and fluid. Also when you’re in EVA you generally can’t see where your legs are and it’s really easy to clip a piece of geometry with them, which will send you into a nasty spin, which gets really annoying really quickly. We’ve got a number of ideas from getting your character to automatically tuck in their legs, to have an IFCS to counter any unwanted spin. There’s going to be a new EVA HUD mode as well to give you some more feedback. When you’re in the middle of space away from any nearby geometry you have very little point of reference to give an indication of what speed and direction you’re moving in, which isn’t much fun.
But mainly we’ve been working on our eating, drinking and chilling.

QA

After November’s hopeful anticipation of 2.0.0 going LIVE to all backers, Andy and the QA team were very proud (and a little relieved!) that it finally launched this month. We’ve been working on it internally for a while!

Hopefully you’re all appreciating the hard work we put in to get it ready for release – there was a great feeling of satisfaction felt in the department, and like I mentioned last time, we’re really getting to grips with the nature of the testing for Star Citizen’s future development.

Some of the UK QA team have had a busier end to the month of December than others… ahem! While some were off enjoying the festive season (me, Andy), the rest of our dedicated team were on hand to make sure that the first 2.1.0 patch made it live to PTU on Christmas Eve. “Merry Christmas”, is probably what they were thinking at the time!

While some might have considered a lack of a full LIVE release of 2.1.0 disappointing, there were a few good reasons why this release was unfortunately not possible. Without going into too much detail, the performance and stability of the build had regressed, meaning we were not comfortable with a release for you guys. This is not unusual any time you add new content or new gameplay, and particularly not when one of the additions is a completely new class of flyable ship. Post-Christmas, this is going to form the majority of our testing in the department – helping to reproduce all the issues and ensure the quality of the experience is back where we want it to be.

2.1.0 has meant that the lucky PTU players were able to experience and help test the Freelancer for the first time – a ship that has prompted plenty of “Starbug roleplay” within the QA team. Hopefully before too long everyone will be able to play the “Rimmer role” once 2.1.0 goes LIVE…

In other news, the UK QA Secret Santa was a great success – highlights include: Pokemon trainer badges, a genuinely horrifying 1980’s E.T., a Transformers lunchbox with flask and a Corinthian Kevin Keegan figurine.

Audio

For Lee Banyard and CIG Audio, December was mostly taken up with ensuring things were as solid as they could be with sound for SC Alpha 2.0. With a game such as ours, testing every possible thing where audio is concerned can be difficult, so we spent a lot of time trying to cover all the bases, going through PTU feedback and issues that came up via QA as well as stuff we found ourselves.

What was everyone up to? Luke, Darren and Stefan were immersed in supporting ships such as the Freelancer and Vanguard. Matteo and Stefan (again, he gets around!) looking more at EVA and FPS elements, while Ross was running the rule over the environments in 2.0 again and again to ensure that all worked as it should, testing out the music logic system, planning battle-chatter system and just general testing. Phil continued with UI audio and with PU environments, especially the Million Mile High Club. Bob was engaged in hammering out anything to do with dialogue, and the larger dialogue system, and last (but not least) Jason continued his stellar work in supporting everyone from a technical standpoint and ensuring the audio build system continued to do its thing.

We continued to plan the orchestral sessions which should be happening in the next month or so, which should align nicely with the progress Ross and Sam Hall are making with the dynamic music system assuming all goes ahead as planned.

And Lee tried to help everyone with everything as much as he could!

Also the team received CIG Audio winter hats as seasonal gifts. I think photos were posted to the Ask A Developer audio thread in case you’re interested. Hope you all had a great winter break!

Foundry 42 Frankfurt

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Hallo aus Frankfurt (Hello from Frankfurt),

Christmas has come and gone, we’re into a new year, and the team is now back from their well-deserved holiday break.

This month we’ll have 4 new people joining the Frankfurt team, bringing us up to 34 strong.

I hope everyone had a good holiday, read below on some of the stuff we did before the break.

Pupil to Planet – Procedural Tech

This past month we showed off the procedural tech we’ve been working on, both in the video Pupil to Planet, and with Chris and Sean playing it live on the livestream.

Marco, Carsten, and Pascal spent a good amount of time working on the tech and environment art, and Hannes came in with final touches and camera work. We had support from others both in and out of the DE office, such as Sean Tracy, Chris Bolte, etc. The character used is a story character from SQ42 called Joachim Steiger. Music was done by our Pedro Camacho and turned out fantastic. Thanks to everyone that pitched in, seeing and navigating around this 1000km diameter planetoid live in-game was and is an absolutely surreal and a mind blowing experience.

The base planet tech of the procedural work was started a few months earlier, in September. Besides the planet tech, there are several different systems helping to make this possible, including the Large World (systems were converted to use 64 bit positioning to allow large seamless worlds), inverted depth buffer and camera relative rendering (which renders everything relative to the camera to minimize loss of precision), and the Zone system (which was worked on mainly by Chris Bolte).

Some generated planet terrain parts are still too big to fit into 32 bit float vertex buffer chunks for the GPU, so they are computed locally and displaced on the appropriate location on the planet, which, when combined with the aforementioned systems, avoid any jittering or loss of precision.

Keeping the entire planet in memory won’t be possible, so the planet surface is allocated a fixed memory budget and procedurally generated on-demand at different level of details as the engine camera moves around the planet.

Then procedural texturing and colors are applied to the surface in realtime depending on terrain shape and other information.

the atmospherics are based on a physically accurate model of light transport taking multiple scattering into account, this allows to render atmospherics correctly and automatically from any viewpoint from outer space to ground level.

We already have some improvements in the works, and we will be updating as the new year goes on. The current plan, as shown in the prototype, is to experience the entire Star Citizen game world in first person, including from walking into your ship, flying and seamlessly landing from space to a docking station on a planet, walking around in first person, entering buildings and doing things at the higher visual fidelity we have shown. Our next steps besides improving the planet generation and visuals would be to integrate the procedural tech into the multiplayer environment so it could be experienced in the PTU.

Engine

On top of the above work wrapped around the procedural tech, the engine team gave support to various areas of the current PTU release. We’re also making further progress on the public crash handler to gather relevant data on why clients crash which should help speed up stabilizing future PTU and public releases.

We’re pushing towards enabling asserts in profile builds to further help catch runtime errors early. As part of this, the internal crash handler and callstack collector service of CE has been totally overhauled.

Cinematics

We’re currently completing our full breakdown of every scene in SQ42’s script and all material that was shot in regards to scene types.

SQ42 features every type of cinematic you could think of. Ranging from relatively straight forward 3rd person cinematics with filmic cameras without player presence, to 1st person player perspective cinematics with look control and then crossing over into more gameplay oriented conversational scenes with AI characters and full player control. Transitions from cinematics into AI characters most of the time needs to be fluid and conversational scenes often can be interrupted by the player so this requires lots of planning and case handling on animation and AI tech side. The amount of material is massive so getting it all sorted and categorized correctly is essential for production.

We are also working on a scene with Admiral Bishop going planetside to view battle damage and a first scene with Captain Maclaren but both are in their early stages of implementation.

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For cinematic environment work, we finished up geometry for the Retribution skydock, started working on the Corvo ruins scene, and started with some terrain RnD of the big background mountains and crater.

Design

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Our system designers are busy coming up with consistent designs for cargo and looting so we can have a clear path of where we need to take these systems and at the same time come up with a tier zero implementation for the baby PU so the players can loot items, move them around and sell them in various stations. The goal here is to implement an initial light version of the system that we can build upon in the future without having to redo it from scratch when the full system will be ready to deploy. These systems should help stimulate different types of gameplay in the baby PU, from cargo transport to market research and even piracy or escorting other players.

Both system and level designers here are now working together with programmers in creating a mission generation system that is modular and that can offer great variation of gameplay. We’re still in the early stages for this system but we’re hoping we can get some early version of it in the baby PU as soon as possible. This system should be able to take data from the universe simulator and generate missions based on that data so let’s say if a system is under heavy pirate threat then we can generate more missions to fight pirates, and even tailor those procedural missions to that specific pirate faction.

Level designers have been pushing through with their Power Management System prototype that they started last month and hopefully we’ll get to play it soon and see how it fits in our current plans for the stations & ships. Also a lot of research & prototyping time was put into various models of asteroid bases and facilities trying to get away from the conventional “planet-like” looking base and exploring all the possibilities that life on a low/no gravity asteroid can offer.

TechArt

TechArt in Frankfurt is continuing to work with the other studios Tech Artists on our bigger DCC pipeline, this month we finalized our puppet from animation perspective.

We’re currently working on finalizing in-game internal rig setups. Further supporting various department RNDs and bug fixing is daily routines for us.

QA

Aside from the usual bug-hunting, I worked mostly on Automated Testing solutions for Star Citizen, developing automated test levels with timed demos with the help of Francesco Di Mizio in the hopes that automating a simple test-run of a level could lead to further automation down the line. Right now a simple test level involving spawning in a location, equipping a loadout and running through the map shooting at AI can test everything from level loading and chainloading to AI-Hit Reactions, bullet physics and particles, character physics & ragdoll, falling damage and a whole host of other functions vital to the core gameplay of S42 and the Persistent Universe. Additional test map demos can now be made and implemented using the same framework that will allow developers to see which changelists cause any problems for any area of the game on a daily basis as changes go in.

Weapons

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The weapon art team has finished the Apocalypse Arms Revenant Ballistic Gatling. As already mentioned in the previous monthly studio report, this is the first weapon to use our new Multi-Layer shader and we are quite happy with the results!

While working with the new shader and being in direct communication with the graphics programmer wizards in the UK we have learned a lot and identified some issues as well as given feedback to further improve the shader in the future.

Environment Art

Last month the Frankfurt environment art team was working on the Shubin space station, a high tech mining facility whose role is to “crack” asteroids in order to mine the valuable minerals that they contain. Shubin will be featured heavily in the Squadron 42 campaign and will differ from the other stations in its design, being a very high tech facility. The station is going to be one of the biggest so far, giving the player the freedom to fly around the huge superstructure and, of course, land and explore the interior on foot. From an artist’s point of view, Shubin has been a huge challenge but at the same time a very rewarding one, giving us the freedom to explore new designs and really try to develop something that we think will provide a real sense of awe when players initially experience it in game.

BHVR

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Greetings Citizens,

Another month of hard work here in Montreal. Here’s what the team have been working on.

Design

The Behaviour design team wrapped up the year with a few things. First, Lead Technical Designer Francois Boucher continued to set up shops and shopping items for the upcoming Casaba Outlet and current stores as well. In parallel, we are working on a streamlined shopping interface that hopefully everyone will like.

Level Designer Jesse Kalb added a bunch of new flair objects to the game as we wanted to get some kind of cushion leading into the new year. We also worked hard solidifying 2.0 and subsequently 2.1 before leaving for the holiday.

Finally, we cooked 3.5 pounds of Canadian bacon for the Star Citizen Behaviour team to celebrate the end of the year. Yummy!

Art

This month, the Environment team continued to work on Levski. Mainly optimizing complex geometry like rock walls and tunnels. Also, we began dressing the interiors, trying to give to each a theme. This will help navigation but also to make it visually interesting when exploring the map. A couple of minor bugs were fixed on ArcCorp and Hangars.

For the Prop team, the next flairs were completed and we are planning the next ones for 2016.

The background and static props where completed for the clothing store. We are now moving on props for industrial/mining planets.

On the Concept Art team , we worked on paint-overs for Levski`s interior shops. You can admire the amazing work done by our concept artists Seungjin Woo on Cordry`s armor shop.

Engineering

Coming to you shortly in version 2.1.0 are a few cool new features. Customizing your ships with the HoloTable will be a little easier. You’re probably used to seeing only your loose ship parts that can be equipped, and you still will by default. However, with a new UI widget you’ll now be able to filter items to see what’s available and what isn’t. For example you’ll now be able to see items on other ships, so you can equip them directly without having to load and strip that other ship first. You can also your whole inventory for a given part category, which could help you plan the loadouts of your personal fleet at a glance. All of this will come with color highlighting and some clearer labeling of the various parts and their stats. For those of you who play well with others, we hope you enjoy the new updates to the party management and contact list UI systems. We’ve also worked hard to improve stability of options, customizations and emotes so you can continue to have fun mingling with others planet-side (or crashing your buggies into each other, whatever floats your boat).

For subsequent updates, we’re working to provide you with a full AR shopping experience, where you can purchase gear for your character in-game and preview the various modifications on your avatar. We’re continuing to work on optimizing ship customizations, allowing you to make temporary modifications in Crusader from a HoloTable, load them into a dock and take flight without returning to your hangar. Any of you who are upgrading your computers this winter may appreciate our modifications to the graphics menu options. Quality settings will apply immediately, allowing you to see their effects without having to leave the menu. You’ll also have a timed screen resolution confirmation dialog, which will help if you try configurations that don’t quite agree with your graphics card or monitor/TV setup. If a resolution doesn’t work for you (no, not the New Year’s kind. unfortunately), it will revert back in 15 seconds. More party and Crusader ship features will continue to be improved as well. Hopefully you’ll have your hands on all of these pretty soon!

On our side, we’re continuing to update our dev tools to help bring you more content and exciting new features in the near future.

Turbulent

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Greetings from frosty Montreal! Here’s what we’ve been up to in the last month, in-between snowfalls :

Pledge Buy Back

In December, we launched a new feature called Pledge Buy Back. Most of you knew it by another, more obscure name, “unmelt”. It allows anyone to undo a mistake they made, like exchanging a limited availability pledge they had for store credit. Anyone will be able to undo such mistakes and do themselves what used to take hours of Customer Service exchanges. This feature is now accessible via My Hangar. Note: there will be a handful of pledges which are and will stay ineligible for Pledge Buy Back : some limited offers, offers linked to third party companies, pledge packages including physical merchandise… The system still allows buying back 99.9% of all pledges ever available, and to date close to 5,000 pledges have been bought back, making it one of our most popular features already!

Organization Invitations

Last month, we completed development on the new Organization invitation email template, so that it would reflect your Org’s identity better and make it less ambiguously linked to RSI Itself. The new layout is currently being tested on different email programs and devices, and once it has passed QA, we’ll go live. Coming soon!

Of course, we haven’t forgotten other Org improvements either! While there’s nothing to report in those regards this month, rest assured that we haven’t forsaken you, and that more robust updates to the Organization are still waiting in the wings for gameplay elements that will support them.

Subscription campaign

We are currently in the Design phase for the new Subscribers section of the website. In addition to the look-and-feel of the new landing page, we are creating a new logo and many other assets which will then be used to promote subscriptions to the general public.

Ship Happens

December was a busy month for ship sales, with the Holiday livestream as well as the end of year free for all sale to close out 2015. The livestream saw the release of the Reliant variants, including a researcher, a reporter and a skirmisher model, each with their own unique loadout and expertise. In 2.0 the new Constellation Andromeda model became available in hangar and crusader. This version also included the Vanguard Warden as hangar ready. As 2015 came to an end, there was also one last free-for-all sale for the year giving everyone a chance to get their favorite ship during the holidays, and serve as what we’ve been calling a grace period before the new Euro rate came into place.

Wishing you all a happy new year!

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Quelle: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/tran…y-Studio-Report

Zitat von Star Citizen

One man's look at flying solo

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Greetings and salutations from Chronos. For my returning friends, a warm welcome back, and for those of you who are wondering just what the heck you’ve stumbled onto, well, I’m Ol’ Jegger and this here is my little slice of the Spectrum called Far From Home.

You know, I actually got stopped by a jumper out Nyx way one time who wanted to know why I called the show Far From Home when I live in my ship. ‘Isn’t Shana your home?’ he insisted and I had to admit that he was right on that point. I’ve lived in the ol’ girl longer than about anywhere else I’ve hung my helmet over the years, so yeah, on one level, I’ve got my home with me everywhere I go, and that’s a big part of why I love this life of mine. But, there’s another part to flying solo; the part where you look out your cockpit and see nothing but black and know that you are absolutely alone; just about as alone as a person can get. That feeling right there — freedom, tranquility and sadness, all rolled into one — that to me is the feeling of being far from home, and I guess on some level, what this here show is about.

Yeah. I know. Didn’t make much sense to that jumper in Nyx neither.

Oh. Before I forget, wanted to say thanks to all of you who somehow remembered it was my birthday this month. Those kind words and vids left me smiling for days. Being that happy can hurt your face if you’re not used to it. Though, to tell the truth, I probably should be by now. No matter how many times I’m reminded of it, it near knocks me on my ass to see just how kind and caring the folks of this ’verse can be.

My birthday is actually the reason why I’m hanging out in Chronos. Believe it or not, me and the Synthworld project were given birth to on the same day. The planet seed was moved into place just as I was popping out. You can see then why it is sort of a tradition of mine to wander this way around December and take a gander at how it’s getting along. The sheer size of it still takes my breath away. Synthworld is one of those things that pretty much everyone has an opinion on: waste of money, proof of the Empire’s hubris, the future salvation of Humanity, or whatever. The only thing I know for sure is that it is one hell of a sight to see, and try or fail, the fact that we even attempted it makes me a little bit proud. Though, to be completely honest, I’m not sure if I ever want to see them finish the thing. I know it sounds silly, but somewhere along the way I got it into my head that I’m not going to be finished until that planet is. Us being siblings of sorts and all.

Other than my birthday, the other thing this time of year that is almost as popular is Traveler’s Day. It’s a pretty big todo amongst us wandering types. I haven’t run into many out there who don’t have some spectacular tales of how they spent their January firsts, myself included. Those of you who were tuned in a few months ago may remember me going on about one Traveler’s Day in particular where the crew of the Evo Horizon really pulled my kiester out of the fire. Well, since sharing that story, I’ve been mulling it over, and rather than celebrating in my normal sort of way, I’ve decided that this year I’m going take inspiration from their kind deed and find some way to pay it forward. What better way to honor Traveler’s Day than by being able to create new tales of charity and giving. So to that end, I’m about to head over to a CTR, load up on as much fuel, food and repair gear as this ’lancer can carry, and jump over to Odin. Come the first, I am going to be out there looking to lend a hand however I can. I may not be as spry on the float as I used to be, but I can still patch a hull something pretty when I need to.

Now the best part of having this show is that not only do I get to do something nice, I get to speak my piece and hopefully convince a few of you to join in too. Like I said before, it is damn incredible just how kind and caring you folks can be. Maybe together we can make home feel a little bit closer to those who need it.

I look forward to hearing your tales as well as sharing my own in the new year. Until 2946 …

Old Jegger signing off.

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Quelle: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/spec…4-Far-From-Home

Zitat von Star Citizen

Star Citizen Alpha 2.1 Available

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Greetings Citizens!

We’re excited to announce that we’ve opened up 2.1.0 on the Public Test Universe (PTU) to all players!

We’ve feverishly been working to get Star Citizen Alpha 2.1.0 ready, but we’ve discovered a couple of issues that prevent it from being a fully enjoyable and stable gaming experience (particularly, temporary significant drops in framerates). The last thing we want is to jeopardize all of the fun everyone’s been having with 2.0.0, and certainly not over the entire holiday period!

With that in mind, we’ll be keeping 2.0.0 on the Live service and opening up 2.1.0 on PTU for all players!

We know some of you really want to check out the flight-ready Freelancer as well as the hangar-ready Sabre, so take a look at the updated 2.1.0 Patch Notes available on the forums:

https://forums.robertsspaceindustries.com/discussion/306…ublished-to-ptu

Important things to keep in mind about PTU, which is a true test environment where we can stage our builds before deploying to Live in order to stabilize the service and catch critical bugs:

- Playing on PTU is completely optional!

- PTU capacity is somewhat restricted compared to Live. If you find that you cannot join a match, we advise waiting for another time.

- PTU is not about “early access” to content; it’s intended for actual testing of features, content, and updates. Opening PTU up is opening up the option to be a tester to help us accomplish near-term development goals.

- You might encounter some game breaking bugs or experience latency issues not seen on the Live service. We encourage all players to help report bugs at https://robertsspaceindustries.com/community/issue-council.

- You’ll have 60GB+ of Star Citizen installed if you decide to play both on Live and on PTU: 30GB+ for the 2.0.0 client on Live, 30GB+ for the 2.1.0 client on PTU. Make sure you have enough space before you start the install!

- We frequently update PTU with large patches. PTU is not advised for those with bandwidth/download caps.

For those players who are not familiar with how to get onto PTU, all you have to do is:

- Start the Star Citizen Launcher and log in with your normal credentials.
- Once logged in, click the gear cog on the top right of the launcherto go to Options.
- Click Copy Account on the lower right.
- You’ll get an email notification with the copy process is complete. This process can take up to an hour if there is a large concurrent influx of players all copying their account concurrently.

This basically wraps up our year, and what a year it has been in building the BDSSE.

We hope you enjoy your time on PTU and Happy Holidays from all of us here at Cloud Imperium Games!

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Quelle: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/tran…ha-21-Available

Zitat von Star Citizen

Starship Sale

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Greeting Citizens,

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Full Throttle

As we announced during the 2015 Holiday livestream, as of January 1st we are updating the RSI site’s Euro exchange rate. For the next five days (through December 28th) we are unlocking the previous ‘Weapons Free!’ sale to give everyone one last change to pick up limited ships and packages at the old rate. We hope this helps you pick up the ship of your dreams as we continue to build the ‘verse!

Remember: we are offering these pledge ships to help fund Star Citizen’s development. The funding generated by sales such as this go directly to the game’s ongoing production. Concept ships will be available for in-game credits in the final universe, and they are not required to start the game.

Explorers

Endeavor

Musashi Industrial & Starflight Concern is proud to present the Endeavor-class research vessel, a fully modular space platform designed to be adapted for a variety of scientific and medical tasks. Initially developed as a floating laboratory, the MISC Endeavor can be outfitted for everything from spatial telescopy to use as mobile hospital.

Carrack

The Anvil Carrack features reinforced fuel tanks for long-duration flight, an advanced jump drive, and a dedicated computer core for jump charting operations. Originally a military exclusive, the Carrack is now available for civilian use. On-board accommodations include crew medical and repair facilities, and a mapping-oriented sensor suite.

315p

Exploration is man’s highest calling. Prepare to chart distant horizons with man’s most sophisticated piece of technology, the ORIGIN 315p. Featuring a more robust power plant and a custom scanning package, exclusively designed by Chimera Communications.

Pirates

Cutlass Black

Drake Interplanetary claims that the Cutlass Black is a low-cost, easy-to-maintain solution for local in-system militia units. The larger-than-average cargo hold, RIO seat and dedicated tractor mount are, the company literature insists, for facilitating search and rescue operations.

Cutlass Red

The Cutlass Red converts the standard cargo hold to a well-equiped medical facility including an Autodoc. This starbound ambulance features the Nav-E7 Echo Transponder, a long range scanner, and a Secure Plus Docking Collar, making it ideal for search and rescue. This model also features a unique Red Crossbones skin.

Cutlass Blue

Sleek, mean, and royal. The Cutlass Blue adds missiles, a more aggressive engine, and Durasteel holding cells in the cargo bay to the standard model. The Cutlass Blue is the outworld militia standard ship of choice for patrols.

Caterpillar

Drake maintains that the Caterpillar, a sprawling, modular spacecraft which appears at least somewhat like its namesake, is for legitimate commerce and extended search and rescue missions… but at the end of the day, the Caterpillar is truly the evil twin of the Freelancer.

Herald

The Drake Herald is a small, armored ship designed to safely get information from Point A to Point B. Featuring a powerful central engine (for high speed transit and generating the power needed for effective data encryption/containment), advanced encryption software and an armored computer core, theHerald is unique among personal spacecraft in that it is designed to be easily ‘cleaned’ when in danger of capture.

Military

Gladiator

The civilian model of the Gladiator appeals to those that want explore the ‘Verse with a bit of added security. Supporting a maximum of two the Gladiator is perfectly equipped to explore and fight with or without a wingman. The Civilian model allows pilots to choose between an extra cargo hold or a bomb bay.

Gladius

The Gladius is an older design which has been updated over the years to keep up with modern technology. In military circles, the Gladius is beloved for its performance and its simplicity. A fast, light fighter with a laser-focus on dogfighting, the Gladius is an ideal interceptor or escort ship.

Sabre

Part of Aegis Dynamics’ Phase Two of new ship models, the Sabre was designed as a space superiority fighter for those situations where you need to leave a lighter footprint. Designed to be a rapid responder, the Sabre is more than capable of establishing battlefield dominance for any number of combat scenarios.

Hornet

To the enemy, it is a weapon never to be underestimated. To allies, it’s a savior. The F7C Hornet is the same dependable and resilient multi-purpose fighter that has become the face of the UEE Navy. The F7C is the foundation to build on and meet whatever requirements you have in mind.

Hornet Ghost

Through a combination of low-emission drives, low-draw weapons, and Void Armor technology capable of diffusing scans, the F7C-S Ghost is built for the pilot who wants to keep a low profile. The Ghost is capable of slipping past the most ardent of observers to accomplish whatever goal you need to accomplish. Don’t worry, we won’t ask.

Hornet Tracker

If the Ghost is made to hide, the Tracker is made to seek. The F7C-R Tracker boasts an advanced radar suite making it ideal for deep-space explorers who require depth and accuracy in their scan packages. Local militia and larger merc units will also repurpose Trackers to act as mobile C&C ships for their squadrons.

Super Hornet

The closest to the Military load-out as is legally possible for a Civilian model, the F7C-M Super Hornet reattaches the ball turret and offers near milspec parts under the hood. Proving that two heads are better than one, a second seat has been added to split the logistic and combat duty, making the Super Hornet a truly terrifying mark to engage.

Retaliator and Modules

The Retaliator is the United Earth Empire’s premiere, if aging, jump-capable heavy bomber. Massive formations of these spacecraft running long-range strike missions is not an uncommon site around the fringes of the empire. With a distinctive elongated silhouette that is dotted with turrets and carrying a massive bomb load, the Retaliator is an effective symbol of Imperial might. As such, they are the frequent centerpiece of Space Force recruiting posters. Retaliators are ground-based, with all but the largest carriers unable to operate them effectively. Heavily modified Retaliators are becoming commonplace on the civilian market as the design ages and earlier production runs are sold off en-mass. Outfitted to carry cargo instead of antimatter bombs and with the waste turret positions typically swapped for makeshift living quarters, they make a good medium freighter or a basic explorer. Some have even been converted into long-hop passenger spacecraft!

Starfarer Gemini

The United Empire of Earth military uses an adapted ‘rough and tumble’ variant of the Starfarer for their front line operations. The G2M Gemini, more commonly the Starfarer Gemini or ‘Star G,’ trades some cargo capacity and maneuverability in exchange for reinforced armor, increased shielding, more powerful engines and stronger versions of the three manned turrets. The Gemini also includes an optional missile pod, which can be swapped for the fuel intake unit on the ship’s nose (see below for details.) Missile pods can be mounted to either Starfarer variant.

Racers

M50

If you want to get from point A to point B as quickly as possible and with as much style as possible then ORIGIN’s M50 is for you. Featuring supercharged engines that counter a tiny weapons loadout, the M50 is a ship for going FAST.

350R

The combination of a Gangleri BP 707 Standard powerplant with a 300i fuselage re-engineered to accommodate twin Hammer Propulsion HM 4.3 thrusters makes the 350r the fastest personal craft you’ll ever call your own.

Mustang Alpha

Inspired by Consolidated Outland CEO Silas Koerner’s cutting edge vision, the Mustang Alpha is a sleek, stylish spacecraft that uses ultralight alloys to push power ratios to the limits, albeit sometimes unsafely. And now, with the optional Cargo Carrier, you can have the Alpha’s advantages without sacrificing carrying capacity.

Mustang Beta

The Mustang Beta, with its unprecedented range, is made for long duration flights. The factory standard Tarsus Leaper Jump Engine enables the Beta to travel to the galaxy’s farthest systems with ease, while the ship’s unique Com4T living quarters will make the journey feel like you never left home.

Mustang Gamma

Consolidated Outland’s design and engineering teams have managed to tweak and refine the Mustang into an admirable racer. The end result, the Mustang Gamma, has smooth acceleration, and power on demand thanks to an innovative package featuring three powerful Magma Jet engines for maximum thrust.

Mustang Delta

While it may not be able to go toe to toe with some of the military specific ships, by reinforcing the Mustang’s already strong hull construction with Consolidated Outland’s own line of Cavalry Class Mass Reduction Armor, the Delta has a reduced cross-sectional signature that evens the playing field.

Alien ships

Khartu-al

The Xi’An Aopoa corporation manufactures an export model of the Qhire Khartu, the Khartu-al, for sale to human civilians as a dedicated scout/explorer. The export model features the same Xi’an maneuvering rig, but control surfaces modified for human use and a more limited armament.

Merchantman

Banu traders are renowned for their merchant prowess, traveling the spacelanes and trading with everyone from humans to the Vanduul! Their sturdy, dedicated trading ships are prized beyond all other transports, sometimes passing from generation to generation of Banu.

Reliant

Following on the success of the Freelancer “Built for Life” campaign, MISC has begun development of a smaller, introductory-class spacecraft that can be operated by a single pilot. Although roughly designed to compete with the RSI Aurora and the Consolidated Outlands Mustang, the Reliant is a very different animal. From the broad, sleek wings to the multiple flight modes and the second, fully-articulated crew seat, the Reliant is a small ship with a great deal of potential!

Worker Ships

Reclaimer

The Aegis Reclaimer is an industrial salvage ship. Equipped with a reinforced cargo bay, a long-range jump drive and launch pods for unmanned drones, the Reclaimer is an ideal ship for taking advantage of deep space wrecks. Tractor beams, floodlights, scanner options and docking ports round out the tools on this capable, utilitarian spacecraft.

Starliner

The Genesis is yet another landmark in Crusader Industries’ proud history of transport designs. This ship utilizes award-winning manufacturing techniques and the highest quality parts to create one thing; a next-generation passenger ship at a price that won’t break your budget. Crusader Industries’ proprietary NeoG engine technology offers some of the most efficient flight for a ship of its size.

Orion

Roberts Space Industries’ goal has always been to make the stars available to individual Citizens. Now, with the RSI Orion mining platform, RSI is letting individuals take over a process formerly controlled by mega-corporations. The Orion’s features include high-grade turret-mounted tractor beam arrays, plenty of mineral storage and a cabin designed by the team that brought you the Aurora and Constellation!

Aurora LX

Be proud of your roots with the brand-new Aurora Deluxe, built for the discerning pilot who never forgets where he or she came from. The LX features patent leather interior to guarantee comfort for those long stretches in the deep black.

Starfarer

The Starfarer differs from traditional bulk freighters in one key way: it is a dedicated fuel platform. The Starfarer is designed not only to load, store and protect fuel stasis units, it is designed to take in spaceborne hydrogen and then refine it for use without landing. The Starfarer can be used to ferry traditional bulk cargo pods (see diagram) but in such cases the fuel refining equipment would be useless. This equipment is modular and can be swapped out for another mission package for dry operations!

Cargo ships

Freelancer MIS

The Freelancer MIS is a limited edition militarized variant of the classic mercantile ship developed by the UEE. These were produced in very small quantity due to some early payload incidents. This version sacrifices the majority of the cargo capacity to make way for missiles.

Constellation Phoenix

A dedicated luxury spacecraft for the discerning star captain. The Constellation Phoenix can be operated as an organization command ship and features a luxurious redesigned interior. Standard amenities include a hidden sensor-dampened area to secure your most precious cargo, the renowned Lynx rover for landing zone exploration, and an elite Kruger P-72 Archimedes Fighter, making this ship one of the most desired in all of UEE space.

To that point, the Constellation Phoenix has proven so popular that RSI produces only a select number every sales season, a tactic that has done well to preserve it’s high demand and resale value year after year. For 2945, Roberts Space Industries is proud to release another 5000 hulls, matching it’s generous rollout from the year before. This year however, in order to maintain a finite and limited stock, Cross-Chassis Upgrade to the Phoenix will not be enabled. This ship will remain on sale throughout the weekend, ending either when time runs out, or the limited stock is exhausted.

Hull A

The smallest, most affordable Hull. The Hull A is great for those just striking out in the galaxy on their own. The Hull A is most similar to the Aurora and Mustang, but lacks the ‘jack of all trades’ nature. Where the others trade cargo capacity for firepower or speed, the Hull A is 100% on-mission transport! Additionally, Hull A (and B) are often used as station-to-orbit ferries.

Hull B

The Hull B is a more rugged option most often compared to MISC’s own Freelancer. But where the Freelancer is equipped for long range exploration and other roles, the Hull B is a pure cargo transport. Hull B are often used as corporate support ships, and it is not uncommon to spot several in different liveries during a single flight.

Hull C

Often called the most common ship in the galaxy, the Hull C is the most-produced of the range and is considered by many to be the most versatile. Intended to hit the ‘sweet spot’ between the smaller single-person transports and the massive superfreighters that make up the rest of the range, the Hull C offers the expansive modularity of the larger ships while still retaining a modicum of the maneuverability allowed the low end of the range.

Hull D

The Hull D kicks off the larger end of the spectrum with a massive ship build around a rugged frame. The Hull D is affordable enough to be operated by mid-sized organizations and companies. Hull D are often used as flagships for mercantile operations, but their bulk means that they should be operated with escort fighters while not in safe space. The UEE military uses modified Hull D as part of their supply chain, arming and refueling the soldiers on the front line.

Hull E

The largest specialized freighter available on the market today, the Hull E is generally owned by major corporations and operated with a high degree of planning. The lack of maneuverability inherent in such a large ship means that anyone planning to operate them should be careful about equipping turrets and providing escort. Their potential load (and modularity) is unparalleled, however: no other ship allows as much room to store goods or to modify towards another role!

Master Packs

New Ships

Crucible

A so-called “flying toolbox,” the Crucible is Anvil Aerospace’s first dedicated repair ship. Featuring a rotating control bridge and a detachable pressurized workspace, the Crucible is a versatile mobile garage equipped with repair arms, a drone operation center and all the equipment needed to overhaul a damaged craft back into fighting shape.

The Crucible, our penultimate Wave Four concept ship, is now available! Designed by the legendary Ryan Church, this repair ship is just the thing for keeping your fleet up and running. When closed, the detachable workshop allows crews to repair single seat fighters internally. When open, the Crucible can use its remote arms to attach and repair larger craft! You can learn more about the Crucible here, and Star Citizen’s overall repair mechanic here.

Avenger Variants

Star Citizen Alpha 2.0 will see the addition of flyable variants for the Aegis Dynamics Avenger! The base Avenger available today is now the Stalker, designed with the needs of bounty hunters in mind. A basic Titan cargo ship and an advanced e-warfare Warlock are also available… and all three will be available for combat in Star Citizen’s next patch!

The Titan and Stalker are permanent additions to the pledge store, the Warlock will be on sale through the end of the anniversary sale (Sunday, November 29th.) Please note that these variants will be available as separate modules in the future. The initial release of Star Citizen Alpha 2.0 does not allow changing modules, so we are offering them as distinct, playable ships first. We would encourage you to CCU to the Avenger you’re most interested in trying rather than picking up all three!

Avenger Titan

Lacking the Prisoner Cells of the Stalker or the EMP Generator of the Warlock, the Titan’s hold is free to carry cargo. Couple that available space with the Avenger’s tried and true combat abilities and you’ve got a light cargo hauler that’s more than capable of handling itself in a fight.

Avenger Stalker

Initially designed as Aegis’ frontline carrier ship for the military, the Avenger Stalker took a different path, ultimately having a long and storied career as the standard patrol craft of the UEE Advocacy. Utilizing its cargo hold for prisoner transport, the Avenger features a sturdy, reliable hull and the capacity for larger-than-expected engine mounts.

Avenger Warlock

The Avenger Warlock was built towards a single design philosophy: stop ships, don’t destroy them. Probably the closest to a non-lethal fighter, the Warlock is outfitted with a Behring REP-8 EMP Generator, capable of emitting a powerful electromagnetic wave to disable any electronics unfortunate enough to be within the blast radius.

P-72 Archimedes

If you’re looking for something a little more agile, blaze among the stars with Kruger Intergalactic’s P-72 Archimedes. Whether for added security, exploring a system or simply the joy of flying, the Archimedes is the perfect companion snub craft. Featuring an extra intake and a lighter hull than its sister ship, the Archimedes delivers exceptional handling and boost capabilities in a sleek package you’ll want along for the ride.

The Archimedes is here! Concepted by Gurmukh Bhasin, the Archimedes is the speedy, luxury alternative to the P-52 Merlin. Initially included with the Constellation Phoenix, the P-72 is interchangeable with Kruger’s other snub fighter and can be attached to any snub-capable Constellation. The Archimedes is available this week as a concept sale.

Vanguard

The A3G Vanguard is the United Empire of Earth’s dedicated deep space fighter. Initially developed as a bomber-destroyer, the Vanguard is a hard-charging bulldog of a ship which features extensive forward-mounted weaponry designed to tear through the shields and armor of other spacecraft. Four high-caliber forward laser cannons and a massive central Gatling gun give the Vanguard an unprecedented amount of sheer striking power. So-named because their multiple-jump range allows them to form the forefront of any military expedition, Vanguard have seen extensive service against the Vanduul.

We’re proud to announce that the Aegis Vanguard will be available as hangar-ready in Star Citizen Alpha 2.0! Going forward, we intend to make ships hangar ready earlier in the process than previously allowed, starting during their advanced greybox phase. The Vanguard will be the first of these ships! In its honor, we’re making all three variants and their BUK options available again this week.

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Zitat von Star Citizen

Letter from the Chairman: Happy Holidays... and Thank You

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Greetings Citizens,

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On the set of Squadron 42

As 2015 draws to a close, I would like to thank everyone in the Star Citizen community for your incredible support. It’s amazing to think that this journey started out just over three years ago with the simple idea that there had to be more people out there than myself who liked space and PC games. Why weren’t the big publishers interested in supporting space games? Why did they think the PC wasn’t a viable platform?

To say that all of you proved them wrong is an understatement. To date, you’ve done that to the tune of over $102 million in crowd funding raised to build this game and a million Citizens signing up to follow what we’re doing here. It’s the game I’ve been dreaming about ever since the moment I learned to program… and I’m pretty sure it’s the game all of you have been dreaming about, too!

For making all of this possible, I can only say: thank you. With this funding we are now building a game that can compete with any AAA publisher backed game out there. No corporate suits deciding what franchise to milk or license. I promised a long time ago that the funds that we raise prior to what we consider the commercial release of Star Citizen would go towards additional development. Because of all of your support we can build this game bigger and better than anyone thought possible a few years ago.

With big numbers comes big attention. Some people look at the number and say “Why should they have all that money?” Well it’s because you want to build a big, bold game that doesn’t compromise! This is the secret. The additional money that comes in doesn’t go towards dividends for shareholders or making analysts happy with our profitability. It gets invested into making Star Citizen the best it can be. Hiring the best talent possible and allowing them to reach for the stars. Your contributions are going towards making the game better for you and all your friends. How could that possibly be a bad thing?

Technology like the procedural planet that we demonstrated in the Pupil to Planet demo during the December livestream is a direct result of your contributions. Without it we wouldn’t have the Frankfurt office or the technical wizards that reside there. Or the incredibly talented team in Manchester! Without the continued support and enthusiasm of the best community in gaming we would have never been able to hire up in the UK, Germany or expand our US development team. Thanks to you, we have been able to build a truly world class team.

But Star Citizen isn’t really about the money, that’s just what’s allowing us to build a game of the ambition and fidelity that people thought wouldn’t be possible.

A huge milestone towards achieving this goal was the release of Star Citizen Alpha 2.0 earlier this month, with the ability to play in a huge area (the biggest yet in gaming thanks to 64 bit floating point positional coordinates) and offering up all of these exciting options in that world: walking around a space station on foot or boarding a space ship by yourself or with friends… walk around that ship and/or have your friends man various stations while you are flying… fly thousands or even hundreds of thousands of kilometers, engage in ship to ship combat against AI or other players, exit your ship to EVA and explore space stations… engage in FPS combat (on foot or in EVA), rescue stranded players, perform various missions. All of this happens seamlessly without loading screens at a fidelity and scale that has not been seen before in any game.

Star Citizen Alpha 2.0 is the first time that you can see how the various elements; space combat, FPS, social interaction, huge play spaces will all fit together into one seamless holistic game experience. You can really see the dawn of the first person universe. Combining the fidelity that we are aiming for with the scale we want has always been our biggest technical challenge. We’re aiming for detail that is as good or better than any AAA first / third person game but that can go from picking out details from several centimeters away to seeing planets hundreds of thousands of kilometers in the distance, all simulated and rendered from the 1st person view of your avatar that can go anywhere.

2.0 shows the naysayers it can be done!

We still have a lot of work to do, many game systems to complete, content to generate, code to optimize, bugs to squash but you can now see what Star Citizen will feel like and in 2.0 you can get an experience you can’t get with any other game. I know that’s a pretty bold claim to make but you just have to visit our forums, or Reddit, or watch hundreds of YouTube videos or Twitch streams to see this happening every day.

The aspect that most excites me is that players are building their own narrative around what happened to them in their 2.0 game sessions. It reminds of when Wing Commander first came out and I noticed people talking about their wingmen / women as real people – not just a game character who you should team up with to complete a mission or level. Instead people were picking their flying partner based on personality and who they liked. That was the moment that I realized something special was happening and the whole was more than the sum of the parts.

Just imagine what you can do with the Star Citizen Alpha 2.0 experience but with even more content and features? More locations and interactions? It’s not really a space sim as we understand them. I find it hard to put my finger on why it seems so liberating but I think the ability to really feel like you can go anywhere and have the universe rendered with such detail and fidelity gives a different sense of immersing oneself in a game. With a lot of other space games, the experience still feels like a game. This feels different. You can even see it in the player behavior in 2.0. There is no win. Just experience and adventure.

And this is just the beginning!

What’s coming next?

Star Citizen Alpha 2.1 goes live to all backers on the PTU today. 2.1 includes a couple of new ships; the re-modeled Freelancer is now flyable and the Sabre, the new experimental medium fighter that we announced at CitizenCon 2015 is hangar ready. Both the Freelancer and the Sabre have benefited from the new ship modeling processes that the Ship Team has developed. Once a manufacturer’s style and look has been defined and we have built out its material set, the process of taking a ship from detailed 3D concept to in-game is much faster than it was previously. As we flesh out the various manufacturers in this manner expect to see quicker turn around from concept to in-game.

Going forward we will be changing our patch release strategy to be less feature driven and more date driven. Our goal is to release a new update every month (so January’s would be SC Alpha 2.2). We have many features in development separate to the release stream, and the idea is that we assess which features are ready for prime time a few weeks out from the release and then greenlight them for inclusion in that month’s release. We would then have a good PTU test, make sure the features really are ready for primetime, fixing up the issues we see and in the case of a feature needing more work, we would pull it out of the release. Physicalized EVA is an example of this. After testing in PTU we felt we needed to do some more work in order to polish it for better usability in certain circumstances.

We feel like this strategy will be better for both development and the community at large. It will ensure constant updates and patches and a good flow of features. But as we’re not defining which features make a particular release, we won’t be in a situation like we were earlier this year where the delays on the FPS development in Star Citizen ended up blocking game updates for the community.

With 2.0 as our foundation, which combines the various game modes into one holistic experience we now have a good strong framework for any new feature updates whether they involve FPS, ship, social or planetside. Expect to see us flesh out a huge amount of the Persistent Universe and its functionality in this coming year.

In addition to this we’ll be hard at work in completing Squadron 42, which is something I’m incredibly excited about. I had a lot of fun working with a great script and amazing set of actors earlier this year and it’s a lot of fun to start seeing all this come alive inside the engine. I will be personally spending a lot of time in the UK with the Foundry 42 team in 2016 closing out Squadron 42 for all of you to play. I can’t wait as Squadron 42 really is how I would have made a next generation Wing Commander. The fluidity that is so compelling in 2.0 only serves to enhance the feeling of immersion and being inside the story for Squadron 42. Combine this with some amazing performances and technology that can transcribe the performance into our game engine… I think the sense of emotional connection to the characters and story will take it to a whole other level than people are used to.

2016 is going to be a great year for Star Citizen!

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Vanduul War Bonds

I’d like to end the year by thanking everyone who is working to make Star Citizen better than I had thought possible. First of all, our amazing, million-strong community. Without you, we would not be here today. Your pledges have made all this possible… the sharing of your passion with others have allowed us to grow… and your excitement and creativity routinely reinvigorate the development team. I can’t properly express what you have meant to Star Citizen. In honor of the $100 million milestone, we’re attributing a UEE War Bond to each of your Hangars. The bond will be issued in the year you started backing (2942 for 2012, 2943 for 2013 and so on). For now, it’s just a small piece of decoration… and someday, when this cruel war with the Vanduul comes to an end, we’ll give you the option to redeem it for credits! (A small example of the kind of fun, immersive things a larger team lets us add to the game.) A special thank you to Algared, the backer who pushed crowd funding into the triple digits. Here’s to our “$100 million dollar man”… and everyone else who got us here.

Next, the incredible development teams around the world who have already transmuted Star Citizen from imagination into reality. I am honored to work with several hundred of the most talented game developers in the world, people who are truly passionate about this project in the same way I am. We have come so far from the tiny original troop of volunteers working to build the proof of concept demo and the crowd funding campaign. I know how hard each of you work, how much you put into Star Citizen. I know how much each of you believes in the universe we’re creating. And most importantly, I know that we will all someday look back, like the backers who supported us, and find incredible satisfaction in these five words: I helped make Star Citizen.

Here are some other ‘end of year’ numbers that speak to the incredible scale of what we’re doing on Star Citizen:

• The Roberts Space Industries website served 178 million page views, with over 9.5 million visitors in 2015
• Citizens have downloaded more than 30 petabytes of content this year.
• 80,000 backers have explored Crusader in 2.0 in the week since its launch.
• The development team created 16,503 tasks in 2015 and resolved over 15,000 of them.
• Developers made 204,716 Perforce checkins/changelists.
• The team generated an average of 6 game builds per day.
• QA has generated over 17,000 bug tickets this year, and the bugsmashers have since resolved almost 12,000 of those.

Finally, I would like to add a sincere thanks and well wishes to the other development teams around the world that share in our passion for space sims. I often see arguments online about which game to play; Star Citizen or Elite, Elite or No Man’s Sky and so on. The truth is that there’s no right answer: the space gaming renaissance is nothing but good news for gamers everywhere. Just as Wing Commander and X-Wing improved one another through competition, so too has Star Citizen been improved by other space games in development. The fantastic teams behind Elite: Dangerous, No Man’s Sky, EVERSPACE, Infinity: Battlescape and others inspire us daily. I wish you and anyone else expanding the frontiers of space and PC gaming all the best for 2016 and beyond!

Thank you all. I hope that everyone has a merry Christmas, a happy holiday and that you will join us again in 2016 for an incredible new year!

— Chris Roberts

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Zitat von Star Citizen

Sponsored by Apocalypse Arms

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< BEGIN TRANSMISSION >

We are locked and loaded, with today’s episode of TRACKER ready to shoot. At the trigger, as always, is me, Garret Coliga, delivering another round of the latest official Bounty Hunter Guild news, tech and tips brought to you by today’s sponsor, Apocalypse Arms. Manufacturer of such fine ship ordnance as the Revenant Ballistic Gatling and the Strife Mass Driver, Apocalypse has just introduced a new line of personal weapons that are as well-crafted and absolutely devastating as their larger siblings. To celebrate, they are having a fantastic Citizen Day special where all customers who earned their Citizenship this standard Earth year can send in a rebate for 25% off. The deal only lasts till the beginning of the new year, so all you newly franchised hunters out there, get shopping. Don’t forget to tell them that Garret sent you.

It’s only been a few weeks now since the declaration of war — about damn time I might add — but already the Guild is seeing an uptick in contracts. With the government sights turning to focus on the Vanduul threat, it seems that there is all the more business coming our way. Doubly so thanks to more than a few brave members stepping up to do their part and enlisting to serve. Our thoughts and well wishes to our brothers and sisters, as well as all the starmen fighting to protect us, but since the boards are being overrun with government bounties, I figured I’d use today’s HotSheet to highlight some of the jobs that are a little more off the beaten path, so to speak.

First up, a mechanic on the make. It seems one Silas Rapapo of Rapapo Repairs out near Vann was trying to up his profit margins by telling people that he was patching up their ship with high-end materials when, in reality, he was slapping on low-grade steel bonding covered in some nice paint work. A scam he apparently had going for a few years, silencing complaints with apologies and bribes where he could, until his shoddy work wound up getting a family of five nearly killed after their hull ruptured during what should have been a routine landing. Mr. Rapapo skipped bail, and has been on the lam since late November. Here’s hoping he escaped in a ship he repaired.

Moving on, we have a refugee gone rogue. After being sent to a Xi’An labor camp as a political dissident, Suec’ath managed to escape to UEE space in the hope of finding asylum. However, the request was denied and the Advocacy are looking to extradite Suec’ath back to Xi’An space. Turns out, the Xi’An are especially eager for the return and are being very generous on this one. Since Suec’ath has already been able to give a highly secure labor camp the slip, you can bet that this is one slippery slink. Smart credits are on them trying to make their way across yet another border to try their luck with the Banu.

Next, we have a lost little one. Eugene and Marigold Helms have listed a private contract for information on the whereabouts of their 13-year-old daughter. She ran away from their Cestulus home three months ago, and there has been no word from her since. The locals have turned up dry, and since the child left of her own will, it hasn’t been much of a priority. Not much of a contract either if I’m being honest, but sometimes the reward is about more than creds.

Which brings us nicely to today’s special guest, Ted Morales, the chair of the Guild’s Committee on Ethical Practices, to talk to us about what it means to have a code of ethics as a bounty hunter. But before we get to Ted, just need to add real quick that for all jobs on the HotSheet and any contract in general, you’re going to want to consult your local Guild or Law Enforcement office to double-check any bounty before confronting a fugitive, as bounties may have been cleared. And of course, jobs must be performed by licensed Guild Members in good standing.

With all that said and done, I’d like to welcome Ted to the program.

Ted Morales: Thanks for having me, Garret. Real excited to be on. I have been listening to TRACKER since I first got involved with the committee about two years ago. It’s a fantastic resource.

Thanks, Ted. Means a lot to me. Really. Now, first things first, I’m sure many of you out there are asking: wait, the Guild has an ethics committee? And the answer to that is a resounding yes. Ted, why don’t you explain to those not in the know what you and the committee do?

Ted Morales: Of course. While there are official laws set by the UEE outlining what a bounty hunter can and cannot do in order to be licensed, the Committee of Ethics is there to help establish guidelines for what a member should or should not do. Or as one of our committee members likes to say, the black and white stuff is easy; we’re there to help with the gray.

I know how easy it is to get wrapped up in the hunt and to justify questionable means because it’s all to help put away bad guys. I’ve done some stuff in the heat of the moment that I’m less than proud of now. An incident involving a suspect’s cat and an airlock comes to mind.

Ted Morales: Most hunters have stories like that. We are doing dangerous work where we interact with criminals every day. It is important for us to have a support system we can lean on to make sure we don’t get caught up in the mire. That’s where the committee comes in; not to make the tough choices for you, but to provide a helping hand so that guild members can be ethical and still perform their job.

I’m a firm believer that it’s worth the effort to make a living that you can live with, but when it comes to doing what’s right or doing what’s going to put creds in your account, it can definitely be a tough call.

Ted Morales: That’s why we’ve developed what we like to call the Four P’s of Responsible Hunting: Purpose, Pronouncement, Proportionality and Prejudice. If you take the time to ask yourself these four things before taking a job, or even in the middle of the job, it could help steer you in the right direct.

For example, with Purpose you ask yourself is there a good reason to be doing what I’m doing? Is there strong evidence for why I should be taking this case? Any hunt or investigation can lead to significant harm to the person or people being investigated, so it’s good as a first step to stop and see if the job itself feels justified before undertaking any action. That’s Purpose.

Right. Does this job seem like it’s a contract worth doing, and not just from a money side. What’s Pronouncement?

Ted Morales: Pronouncement is asking if the job or actions you are undertaking have been made public to the Guild or to the proper authorities, and if they have not, would you feel comfortable if they did come to light.

The old ‘would you be embarrassed if your parents found out’ test.

Ted Morales: Exactly, thinking about your peers’ or mentors’ reactions can definitely be a good guideline. If you wouldn’t want them to know, then maybe you should reconsider what you are about to do. The next ‘P’ is Proportionality. Are the actions you are taking appropriate to the task at hand?

Okay. Like how blowing up a ship might be totally valid for chasing down a violent suspect, but a little out of hand if you’re trying to nab someone who is delinquent on their support payments.

Ted Morales: Right. Just because a certain level of violence is justified in one case does not mean it is universally ethical. It is important to constantly be evaluating and making sure you are using the appropriate tools and techniques for the job at hand.

We’re going to have to take a break in just a second, here, but if my count is correct, I think we just have one ‘P’ left.

Ted Morales: The last one is Prejudice. Not only discrimination against people of different races, species, economic class — which is important — but also in the sense of your own personal feelings on the case. Have you had a problem with a shipjacker in your own line that may change the way you approach a contract? Did your parent’s store get robbed once, and you have —

Hold that thought, Ted. We need to hop to commercial for a minute, but when TRACKER comes back we are going to talk through how to use the four ‘P’s on some real life case examples, and explore what to do if you do make an ethical mistake. Plus, we’ve got a review of some new facial scan tech that you’re not going to want to miss. More TRACKER on the way.

< TRANSMISSION BREAK >

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Quelle: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/spec…ode-Of-The-Hunt

Zitat von Star Citizen

The Reliant Variants Are Here!

It’s time.

Your whole life, you’ve had your feet planted on the ground, but felt the pull of the stars. You’ve come close to buying ships in the past, but didn’t because you never found a ship that inspires the same awe and wonder that you feel every time you look at the night sky.

That’s about to change.

Introducing the new Reliant. Proudly continuing MISC’s legacy of award-winning reliability and engineering ingenuity, MISC’s new Reliant is a versatile and durable multi-crew ship that is priced to own and guaranteed to last.

Speak to an authorized MISC dealer today for options and take that first step off your world.

The MISC Reliant variant lineup is here! We’ve imagined MISC’s entry into the starter market as an elegant yet utilitarian design capable of fulfilling a number of specific functions. Each Xi’An-tech infused variant has a specific role intended to offer expanded gameplay to the Star Citizen ‘verse. Whether you’re holding off rogues on the frontier, studying distant stars or broadcasting the latest action from the front lines, there’s a Reliant for everyone. We hope you enjoy the work our designers and artists have done developing three distinct new Reliant types!

About the Sale

The Reliant variants are being offered for the first time as a limited concept sale. This means that the ship design meets our specifications, but it is not yet ready to display in your Hangar or to fight in Arena Commander. The sale includes three year insurance on the ship hull and a pair of decorative items for your Hangar. A future patch will add a Crucible poster and then once the in-game model is finished you will also be given an in-game Reliant variant mini ship model! In the future, the ship price will increase and the offer will not include Life Time Insurance or these extras.

If you’d like to add one to your fleet, they’re available in the pledge store until December 28th. You can also view a detail of the Reliant in the Holo Viewer in the Tech Overview of the ship page!

Disclaimer

Remember: we are offering this pledge ship to help fund Star Citizen’s development. The funding generated by sales such as this is what allows us to include deeper, non-combat oriented features in the Star Citizen world. Concept ships will be available for in-game credits in the final universe, and they are not required to start the game. All decorative ‘flare’ items will also be available to acquire in the finished game world. The goal is to make additional ships available that give players a different experience rather than a particular advantage when the persistent universe launches.

Reliant Kore – Mini Hauler (Base)

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With the Reliant Kore, MISC adds to its already impressive lineup of ships, a smaller introductory-class spacecraft. Utilizing advanced Xi’An designs, the Reliant features broad, sleek wings, omni-directional thrusters and a fully-articulated two-seat cockpit that supports horizontal and vertical flight modes. All of this combines with a larger carrying capacity than many ships in its class to make the Kore a natural choice for short-range hauling, or with the simple addition of a few optional components, this can-do ship can do anything you dream of.

Visit the Reliant

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Reliant Sen – Researcher (Variant A)

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Magellan, Pierce, Croshaw, names that echo through history thanks to their adventurous spirit, a curious nature and a reliable ship. The Reliant Sen is a versatile mobile science platform; outfitted with long range capabilities to take you further, longer, and an advanced sensor suite. Perfect for the aspiring explorer who wants to whisper their name into the halls of history.

Visit the Researcher

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Reliant Mako – News Van (Variant B)

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The Empire depends on up-to-the-second information, which is why reporters need to be able to go where the news is happening: wherever, whenever. Enter the Mako, all the flexibility and dependability of a MISC Reliant combined with a state of the art Image Enhancement suite and turret-mounted optics to capture every moment as it happens with the clarity and accuracy that makes headlines.

Visit the News Van

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Reliant Tana – Skirmisher (Variant C)

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With Humanity ever-expanding through the universe, the need for a versatile lightweight fighter has expanded with it. Easy to maintain with a rugged construction, the Reliant Tana makes for an ideal choice for frontier and outpost defense thanks to its custom high-yield power plant, stronger shields and additional weapon mounts.

Visit the Skirmisher

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Reliant Sale

Purchase Your Reliant Now!

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Quelle: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/tran…eliant-Variants